
Class. 



Book 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE HOME WORLD 



THE HOLY FAMILY 
Murillo 



The home World 

FRIENDLY COUNSELS FOR 
HOME-KEEPING HEARTS 



FRANCIS X. DOYLE, S.J. 




New York, Cincinnati, Chicago 

BENZIGER BROTHERS 



1922 






ZHmptxmi Potest. 

Joseph H. Kockwell, S.J. 

Praep. Prov. Marylandi<e-Neo-Ebor. 

;MI]U <®betnL 

Arthur J. Scanlan, S.T.D. 

Censor Librorum. 

<3intprmtatur. 

►> Patrick J. Hayes, D.D. 

Archbishop of New York. 
New York. January 25. 1922 



Copyright, 1922, by Benziger Brothers 



MAR 1 1 1922 
©CI.A659087 






Ufa 

ifflp fatfjer, STofjn g. ©ople, tefjo, tottfj tfje fjclp 
of a fitotet labp, mp motljer, bcab tfjese msnp 
pears, maoe fitsf fjome a Beautiful tfnng in tfje 
sitgvjt of <&O0 anb man. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER FACI 

I Cherishing the Home 9 

II Old Familiar Things 17 

III Building the Home 29 

IV Ruling the Home 38 

V Happiness at Home 51 

VI Deals with the Beauty of Age; the Family 
Album and Baby Shoes; Old Cradles; High- 
Chairs; Go-Carts and Lace-Caps 63 

VII Sorrow and Death in the Home 77 

VIII The Death of the Young 91 

IX Peace Sought and Found 109 

X The Home Feast of Mothers and Children. 121 

XI Love, the Motive Power of Life 133 

XII Consulting the Specialist 142 

XIII Moral Courage in the Home 150 

XIV The Bane of Home Life 157 

XV The Cradle of Catholic Leaders 163 

XVI Work 171 

XVII After Your Vacation 1 79 

XVIII Playing Ourselves Into Heaven 187 



Stay, stay at home, my heart, and rest; 

Home-keeping hearts are happiest, 

For those that wander they know not where 

Are full of trouble and full of care; 

To stay at home is best. 

— Longfellow. 
Song. 

Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast. 
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round. 
And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn 
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups 
That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each, 
So let us welcome peaceful evening in. 

— Cow per. 
The Task. 



THE HOME WORLD 



CHAPTER I 

CHERISHING THE HOME 

IN one day we live in many different worlds. 
There is the home-world of the morning hours 
before we bundle off to work. There is the 
street-world and the trolley-world that we mingle 
with on our way to work. And during the day, 
there is the long hard world of work, work, work. 
Then there is the returning round of these worlds 
but in an opposite direction, thank God, and end- 
ing in the world of home and comfort, happiness 
and rest. This repetition of home, work, home, 
varied by a little good amusement, a week or two 
of vacation in the summer months, periodical 
holidays, like Christmas and Easter, forms our 
life. This is true no matter what our work may 
be, and it is good once in a while to look into 
the various worlds that form our daily life and 
see what we are doing in them. 

This multitude of worlds in the short space of 
one day is an impressive thing. It astounds you 
when you think about it. For we enter and re- 
main a short time in each world, mingle with its 
respective inhabitants, exert a conscious or un- 
conscious influence on each dweller there, and go 
out of it leaving it better or worse for the moment 
we lived in it. The silent influence of good or 
bad example has been the powerful weapon 



io THE HOME WORLD 

wherewith we assaulted our neighbor. After all, 
it is about our influence in the little worlds that 
make up our daily round that we shall be ques- 
tioned on the last day. Hence it is wise to sit 
here and review our conduct and see what we 
can do to bring more love and light and holy 
cheerfulness into the big world which is nothing 
more than all our little worlds put together. 

For instance, look at the home-world. Your 
companions are the familiar ones of home, father, 
mother, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles. 
If you have not all these relatives, you know well 
those you have, and feel perfectly free in their 
company. There is an intimacy here which you 
will not experience in any other small world of 
the day, for no world is like this world of home. 
Its companions, atmosphere, resources and happi- 
ness surpass by far those of any world except 
that of Heaven. "Our natural and happiest life 
is when we lose ourselves in the exquisite ob- 
sorption of home, the delicious retirement of de- 
pendent love." 1 

"A home is four walls inclosing one family with 
identity of interest, and a privacy from outside 
inspection so complete that it is a world in itself, 
no one entering except by permission, bolted and 
barred and chained against all outside inquisi- 
tiveness. The phrase so often used in law-books 
and legal circles is mightily suggestive — every 
man's house is his castle, as much so as though 
it had drawbridge, portcullis, redoubt, bastion, 
and armed turret. Even the officer of the law 
may not enter to serve a writ except the door be 
voluntarily opened unto him; burglary, or the in- 
vasion of it, is a crime so offensive that the law 



CHERISHING THE HOME n 

clashes its iron jaws on any one who attempts it." 8 
You are so used to your home that you do not, 
perhaps, appreciate it as you should. Its con- 
tinued stability has become an accepted thing. 
Your home is like the eternal mountains and it 
would be a fearful shock to you if anything oc- 
cured to shake its foundations and bring it crash- 
ing down. Oh, what a ruin is the crushed home ! 
The walls have closed in relentlessly, and for you, 
maybe, the home does not exist any more. When 
the home is broken up, when some volcano of 
human emotions has erupted and belched its 
poison over your home-world, you will begin to 
realize what you enjoyed and what you miss. The 
broken home is a sad sight. The study of those 
violent emotions that wreck homes is the saddest 
of studies. Only a priest can fully realize what 
a sad study this is, for in his experience he has 
seen homes come tumbling down despite every 
effort to keep them firm. 

The home is a ruin, like the deserted house 
Irving describes : "The house was now silent and 
deserted. I saw the windows of the study which 
looked out upon the soft scenery I have mentioned. 
The windows were closed — the library was gone. 
Two or three ill-favored beings were loitering 
about the place, whom my fancy pictured into 
retainers of the law. It was like visiting some 
classic fountain that had once welled its pure 
waters in a sacred shade, but finding it dry and 
dusty, with the lizard and the toad brooding over 
the shattered marbles." 

If in your present home-world, you can in any 
way, even by great sacrifices, prevent the spread 
of the poisonous emotions, never hesitate to do 

*Talmage, The Marriage Ring. 



12 THE HOME WORLD 

it. The future will repay you by happiness. God 
will repay you by His graces. Have you ever 
seen a home wrecked by jealousy? Or stubborn- 
ness on the part of the wife or husband? It is 
something of this kind that grows up like the 
Genii in the Arabian Nights, and devours the little 
home-world which you fondly thought nothing 
could touch. In the beginning the thing was foul, 
but you did not notice it, just as you do not notice 
the minute specks of dust until the bright ray of 
sunlight catches them up and reveals them. And 
in their effects these infinitesimal beginnings are 
like the mighty Vesuvius, that roars its thunderous 
streams of molten rock down on the hapless cities 
and buries them in fire. 

Small jealousies breed great disasters. Little 
hates are like accursed acorns from which grows 
nothing so beautiful as the majestic oak. Foul 
swamp weeds spring up from such seeds sown in 
the home-world and if the home does not become 
either suddenly or in the near future, a bleak, 
stagnant, loathsome swamp of human emotions, 
then the sacrifice of some hero or heroine saved it 
and transformed the hate and jealousy by love and 
forbearance. 

Whatever world you enter or leave, whatever 
world you influence, there can be no question but 
that your widest influence is here in the home- 
world. The difficulty seems to be oftentimes that 
because this is the most familiar of our worlds, 
we neglect it more or less, and prove ourselves 
unconscious or thoughtless of its demands on our 
influence. Here we should be at our best. The 
finest gentleman and the finest lady are to be 
found at home. Outside of home we show our- 



CHERISHING THE HOME 13 

Selves for a little while, but home is our abiding 
place, the center of our happiness, and it is here 
alone the truest and best that is in us should be 
discovered. 

The finger of God points to home and He bids 
us find our earthly joy there, and the sad experience 
of many, is a fruitless search for happiness out- 
side the sacred walls. And what does the world 
give in exchange for the gloomy harvest? Is it 
fame? Burke said that he would not give a peck 
of refuse wheat for fame. The poet Byron 
drained the cup of earthly joy to the dregs and 
then sighed for death. He had everything but a 
home. Glory and fame were his, but the warmth 
of home would never fill his veins with happiness. 
Fame! Why, this is air, a mere fantasy, some- 
thing a fevered man sees in troubled dreams. Yet 
the world of home is beset by this phantom and 
the threshold is crossed many and many a time 
because fame beckons and, lacking the right judg- 
ment of what we leave and what we strive for, 
off we go into the gay arms of the world, only to 
return with our peck of refuse wheat and the 
tears of disappointed regret. 

The touch of the outside world on flesh warmed 
by home-fires is like a demon's heated breath of 
passion. The ruin is terrific, because innocence 
has been blasted. 

Our homes are sacred places. They afford us 
escape from sickening failure when we return 
breathless and conquered in the strife for money, 
place and glory; home is as refreshing as the cup 
of cool water after the heats of the day; it is our 
solace when the world has opened its huge maw 
and swallowed our peace. Faith in Christ is the 



i 4 THE HOME WORLD 

rock we cling to when the world grows stormy, 
and this faith is calm, serene and strong in the 
home. How many Prodigals have returned to the 
beloved walls with a sense of amazement and 
wonder that they could ever have left them so 
easily, so eagerly ! The doors of home open out- 
wards with slow creaking and noisy protest, but 
with gladness do they swing inward, like embrac- 
ing arms. 

A rich soil will grow as thick a crop of weeds 
as of wheat, and the difference is in sowing and 
cultivating, the time and labor and amount of self- 
sacrifice in keeping out the weed and helping the 
wheat to grow its golden grains. Now the rich 
soil of the home is this soil of self-sacrifice and 
the harvest is more golden than wheat. 

How often have you seen some good self- 
sacrificing girl save the home from ruin after the 
mother had died? She slaved for the younger 
children, sacrificed her youth to hard work, her 
beauty to nights with the needle and hours over 
the cooking range, and perhaps in the end became 
an old maid for her charity. She never had time 
for wooing. Her life was the worker's life, the 
burden was on her slim shoulders, and if the chil- 
dren today know what the influence of home 
means, she is responsible and hers is the reward. 
There must be a special place set apart in heaven 
for those faithful, self-sacrificing women, who 
raise the children of other mothers at the hard 
price of never having children of their own. 
What would become of many families if all the 
old maid aunts had not sacrificed themselves on 
the stone of selfless devotion? 

How often have you seen some young boy just 



CHERISHING THE HOME 15 

growing into manhood take on his shoulders the 
support of the family when the father was 
snatched away suddenly and when the distracted 
mother hardly cared where the next meal was to 
come from! The other children were too young 
to realize the seriousness of their loss. They 
drew their chairs up to the dining-table as usual. 
There had to be bread and the young boy earned 
it. Perhaps he gave up an education to hold that 
home together. If, then, he does not know how 
to spell correctly; if he does not use the choicest 
language in his conversation, do not consider him 
a boor, an uncouth fellow not worth knowing. In 
God's sight he is a hero, and your opinion, while 
it may hurt his feelings, will not change the eternal 
decrees one whit. It is you who are foolish to 
condemn a fellowman or woman without knowl- 
edge of the circumstances that went to mould his 
life. 

This is the real influence to be exerted in home- 
worlds. This is real charity. Self-sacrifice like 
this can hold back the tide of many destroying 
floods and keep the home safe. This is one of 
the finest things in the world and you can see the 
fineness and beauty of it very often in the clear, 
brave eye of the girl and boy making the sacrifice. 
Without such heroism many a home would be a 
barn, and without it the mansion of marble may 
as well be the swamp lands where crows caw their 
mournful cries. 

The whole human race is but one large family, 
and Eden was the cradle, the world is its home, 
the Father in heaven is at once the guardian, the 
law-maker and the reward, but self-sacrifice has 
been demanded of lonely women and brave men 









1 6 THE HOME WORLD 

ever since the race was born. Woman must al- 
ways be up and doing and agonizing over the chil- 
dren of men, and if her smile is music and her 
voice a song, the theme of the harmony is sacrifice. 
Think how wonderful must have been the first 
long ray of pure white light as it went leaping 
in its splendor across the gloomy dark of primal 
chaos! Yet this beauty was only material, and 
the beauty of self-sacrifice is greater. This beam 
of light pierces the worldly chaos of today and 
illumines souls. Its reach is limitless and its beams 
are cheering comfort. Where self-sacrifice is, 
there the home is truly cherished. This is the first 
ruddy home-fire and it should never grow dull or 
chill for want of fuel. 



CHAPTER II 

OLD FAMILIAR THINGS 

IN the home-world everything is familiar, so 
much so that you do not notice those details of 
life and living that surround you. The paper on 
the wall, for example, has become so much a part 
of your eyesight that you cannot tell off-hand what 
color it is. Thus the things we are most familiar 
with are the things we know least. This statement 
may sound strange, but truly here the old saying is 
verified that familiarity breeds contempt. You 
have but to test this argument on your friends. 
When you are at work today, ask your best friend : 

"What is the color of the paper on the din- 
ing-room wall?" 

You will get an answer like this : 

"The paper on the dining-room wall? Why, 
eh, it's a kind of blue, I think, one of these flower 
effects, you know. But wait! Maybe it's red. 
Now I come to think of it, it is red. But I may 
be mistaken. Really, I forget." 

The same may be said of the curtains on the 
windows. Unless you took a certain overweening 
pride in hanging them yourself, or in making them, 
it is safe to say that you will not notice them 
particularly until they have been taken down. 
Then their absence calls your attention to the fact 
that they were once there. It is like an alarm 



1 8 THE HOME WORLD 

clock in your bedroom. If it stops you know 
something is wrong, but while it ticked away the 
moments of your life, you never noticed it. You 
were familiar with the sound and forgot it. 

"Blessed is that home," says a modern writer, 
"in which for a whole lifetime associations have 
been gathering, until every figure in the carpet, 
and every panel of the door, and every casement 
of the window has a chirography of its own, spell- 
ing out something about father, or mother, or son, 
or daughter, or friend that was with us awhile. 
What a sacred place it becomes when one can say: 
In that room such a one was born; in that bed 
such a one died; in that chair I sat on the night 
I heard such a one had received a great public 
honor; by that stool my child knelt for her last 
evening prayer; here I stood to greet my son as 
he came back from a sea-voyage; that was my 
father's cane; that was mother's rocking chair 1 
What a joyful and pathetic congress of remini- 
scences!" 1 

There is a good story told by a young Jesuit 
priest who served in the French army during the 
war. His name is Lieutenant Marcel Jousse, and 
as he had been trained in the military school before 
he became a priest, he was called to the colors as 
an artilleryman. He hated the work, for he was 
a priest, but did his duty well. He wears the 
Legion of Honor and the Croix de Guerre. In 
describing the effect the noise of the big shells had 
on him, he said: 

"No one can realize it unless from actual experi- 
ence. The explosion at first, in the early days of 
the war, seemed to shake the earth and break the 
ears. It was a tremendous uproar of sound, a 



^The Marriage Ring. 



s 



OLD FAMILIAR THINGS 19 

hellish upheaval of noise. Gradually, when one 
heard this sound day after day, one got used to 
it. After three years and a half I was so habituated 
that when I was sent to Washington on the French 
Military Mission, I could not sleep at night. I 
grew very nervous. I did not know what was the 
matter. I sought the cause of the trouble and 
finally came to the conclusion that I could not 
sleep because there was not noise enough. I 
missed my big shells." 

Certainly this was a strange sound to lull a man 
to sleep and yet when the noise was absent, Father 
Jousse missed it. He was not suffering from the 
ordinary shell shock but from the loss of his shell 
music. He had become used to the hissing lullaby 
of death. 

The American soldiers, in the same way, found 
difficulty in sleeping in a mere four-walled room 
when they returned from overseas or camp. They 
had been used to the large room of outdoors, 
with the sky for roof and the wind blowing fresh 
on their faces. When they came home and got 
into bed and tried to sleep, they choked. There 
was not enough air. Such is man! A creature of 
custom, a piece of putty that can be moulded quite 
rapidly into various forms which he hates to lose 
once they are fixed on him. 

So it is the same way with the curtains on the 
windows of your home. You could not describe 
them, especially if you are a man, and more, you 
could not realize how much they add to your warm 
home comfort. But when they are taken down 
and the cold glass of the window stares harshly 
at you, you know at once that something has 
gone wrong. A familiar thing is absent. 



20 THE HOME WORLD 

Even the china cups and saucers, the plates and 
knives and forks, are things of importance in the 
home-world. They make up those details that are 
called local coloring, and yet they exist as such 
only in your inner consciousness. Put a new cup 
on the saucer for breakfast and you notice it at 
once. How many times have you passed over the 
old one unnoticed? 

"Why look!" you will say, " here's a new cup I 
It's got a green border!" 

The chairs and tables are old familiar things. 
The table-cloths you have admired in your youth, 
wondered at in your middle age, and laughed at 
when you came back from your own very modern 
home to see the old folks. 

Consider the clock on the dining-room mantel- 
piece. There is a brave Indian rider on a prancing 
horse. The savage holds a long sharp spear, and 
the horse has one foreleg gracefully curved. The 
set of his head is magnificent. The flowing mane 
is majestic. You can smell the fresh breeze that is 
blowing. Now when you were young, you used 
to stand in front of the mantelpiece and marvel 
at that clock. First, it spoke to you for a long 
time in little rusty-like whisperings, tick-i-ti-tock, 
tick-i-ti-tock; and the red Indian looked feroci- 
ously at you and the horse seemed very wild. The 
Indian's menacing spear sent a thrill through your 
young blood and you could never get over the 
marvel of so much splendid action frozen in one 
small piece of bronze. 

But the best of all times in your youth was the 
striking of that clock. When you remember it 
now, close your eyes and, if it is striking nine 
o'clock in the evening, you can see your white- 



OLD FAMILIAR THINGS 21 

haired grandmother knitting at the dining-room 
table ; and the old grandfather quietly sleeping in 
the wide-armed rocker. Notice how his head has 
fallen to one side? Perhaps your brother John, 
who is going to college, is frowning over the 
Greek or Latin or maybe a problem in geometry. 
You can see the lamp with the soft red shade. 
Your young sister is studying very hard and you 
rejoice your eyes in the calm beauty of her face. 
You? What are you doing? Can you remember 
as you watch the old clock now? Well, you were 
in the corner talking with your mother. And 
Dad was there near the lamp, poring over the 
political sheet and shaking his head at the down- 
fall of the world. 

Suddenly the clock groans, chimes a warning, 
and then strikes nine silver strokes of home-music. 
Your grandfather wakes up with a stiff neck and 
rubs it hard to restore the circulation. John's 
brow clears. He had set a time limit to his work 
and the problem was solved. He works by the 
clock and is just as systematic now. Your pretty 
sister looks up, gasps at the time, and turns back 
to her work. Your grandmother looks around the 
room, smiles one of those wrinkly old smiles that 
are filled with such deep knowledge of human life. 
Then perhaps you kissed your mother and went to 
bed, yawning hard as you tramped wearily up 
the stairs. 

Anyhow, stand in front of the clock, shut your 
eyes, and submit yourself willingly to its magic 
spell and you will easily see all those dear things 
of the past that can come back to you now only 
in vision. True, the clock and the prancing horse 
and the Indian remain. The clock speaks as 



22 THE HOME WORLD 

sweetly as ever of the flowing tide we call time, but, 
well — the old grand-parents are not there any 
more, and in many, many homes, the mother's 
voice is not heard, and the boys and girls are 
away far and wide working in other little worlds 
of their own. 

If growth to manhood and womanhood has 
brought you many favors and blessings, it has also 
taken many away and these you recall once in a 
while when you come back into the world of the 
old home and see all its familiar surroundings 
and settings. Think of the influence the old home 
had on you and then ask yourself very honestly 
about your influence on the world of your own 
home nowadays. 

"Our hearts," says Oliver Wendell Holmes, 
are held down to our homes by innumerable fibres, 
trivial as I have just recalled; but Gulliver was 
fixed to the soil, you remember, by pinning his 
head a hair at a time. Even a stone with a whitish 
band crossing it, belonging to the pavement of the 
back-yard, insisted on becoming one of the talis- 
mans of memory. . . . But the plants that 
come up year after year in the same place . . . 
give me the liveliest home-feeling. Close to our 
ancient gambrel-roofed house is the dwelling of 
pleasant old Neighbor Walrus. I remember the 
sweet honeysuckle that I saw in flower against the 
wall of his house a few months ago, as long as I 
remember the sky and stars. That clump of 
peonies, butting their purple heads through the 
soil every spring in just the same circle, and by 
and by unpacking their hard balls of buds in 
flowers big enough to make a double handful of 
leaves, has come up in just that place, Neighbor 



OLD FAMILIAR THINGS 23 

Walrus tells me, for more years than I have 
passed on this planet. It is a rare privilege in 
our nomadic state to find the home of one's child- 
hood and its immediate neighborhood thus un- 
changed. Many born poets I am afraid, flower 
poorly in song, or not at all, because they have 
been too often transplanted." 2 

The old-fashioned mantelpieces with their 
quaint statuettes and embroidered hangings 
formed a bright bit of color in your home-world. 
Perhaps they do yet but in apartment-house life 
these ancient ornaments are out of date. They 
take up too much room and the loss is really 
never made up. 

The kitchen stove has disappeared with the 
years and a modern gas contrivance has taken its 
place. Can you remember the wonderful smell 
of baking bread soaring through the house like 
a blessing? Can you remember the huge slice of 
fresh bread your mother gave you when you re- 
turned home after school? You had to bring up 
the coal for the fire, that's true, and it was never 
an agreeable performance. Still, on a winter's 
night, with the wind trying to wreck the house and 
shrieking and yelling outside like a demon, that 
warm coal fire and the clean kitchen and the 
loaves of fresh bread on the table were things to 
be proud of and in your heart there was great 
contentment. That is, if you were a homey body 
and loved simplicity. Nowadays it seems as if all 
those fine old things were to be laughed at. The 
mistake is a sad one and the sooner we all return 
to the strength of that ancient home with its 
wonderful simplicity and peace, the sooner shall 

we sophisticated, proud and foolish moderns be- 
^olmes, The Professor at the Breakfast Table. 



24 THE HOME WORLD 

come almost as good as the great people who 
bore us, who trained us and finally left us to rush 
headlong into the icebergs we are now. 

So the poet sings of the changes time has 
brought 

This is my home again! Once more I hail 
The dear old gables and the creaking vanes: 
It stands all flecked with shadows in the moon, 
Patient and white and woeful. 'Tis so still, 
It seems to brood upon its youthful years, 
When children sported on its ringing floors, 
And music trembled through its happy rooms. 3 

An old man was moaning about modern im- 
provements. His pet trouble was the loss of 
mantlepieces. With him there was a particular 
affection for a certain mantelpiece and in trying 
to find out his grudge against us moderns, we 
finally wormed the story out of him. 

"Why," he said, "it was this way. My father 
was a big man, six feet and more. My mother 
was small, five feet, two inches. We boys used 
to pick her up and carry her around the house 
many times despite her protesting cries. When 
we were young boys just growing up, we never 
hoped to be as big as Pop but when we began 
to reach up to the mantelpiece in the dining-room, 
mother would sigh and say: 'Jim is as big as I 
am.' 

"Regularly every birthday, Pop lined up the 
boys and girls and made Mom stand at the mantel- 
piece. Her dear head just reached the top. Then 
there was excitement and accurate measuring to see 
if the boy was as big as his mother. Soon she was 
the smallest of her family and then there was a 

•Alexander Smith. 



OLD FAMILIAR THINGS 25 

celebration. I can always see the old mantelpiece 
and one of these frilly hangings with a lot of 
raised work on the borders. I forget what they 
call them. Lambrequins, isn't it? And I can 
always see my mother standing there with Pop 
measuring the children by her head. My mother ! 
She has been dead for fifty years! May God 
grant me the grace to see her soon! I shall be 
as proud of her in Heaven as I was on earth." 

The old man, after all is said, had a good 
reason to like mantelpieces. He evidently loved 
that particular one for its associations with his 
mother. Her influence over the children in her 
home-world must have been powerful as it was 
gentle and lasting. 

The story is related of Henry Clay, the elo- 
quent old man of the Senate, that when he lay 
dying, his fevered brain brought up images of 
his mother long since dead, and the old man cried 
out continually, "My Mother! Mother! Mother!" 
This is a sure index of the influence Clay's mother 
had upon him in early life and we can wish noth- 
ing more blessed in a home than this motherly 
influence which survives age and the passing of 
years and the glitter of glory. The home on 
earth is called the vestibule of heaven where all 
the precious mothers of the race are waiting to 
continue that love and influence which they began 
on earth and left off for a little time to go see 
God. Consider this picture sketched by a son 
thinking of his mother: "There she sits, the old 
Christian mother, ripe for heaven. Her eyesight 
is almost gone, but the splendors of the celestial 
city kindle up her vision. The gray light of 
heaven's morn has struck through the gray locks 



26 THE HOME WORLD 

which are folded back over the wrinkled temples. 
She stoops very much now under the burden of 
care she used to carry for her children. She sits 
at home too old to find her way to the house of 
God; but while she sits there, all the past comes 
back, and the children that forty years ago tripped 
round her arm-chair with their griefs and joys and 
sorrows — those children are gone now, some 
caught up into a better realm, where they shall 
never die, and others out in the broad world, 
testing the excellency of a Christian mother's dis- 
cipline. Her last days are full of peace, and 
calmer and sweeter will her spirit become, until 
the gates of life shall lift and let the worn-out 
pilgrim into eternal springtide and youth, where 
the limbs never ache, and the eyes never grow 
dim, and the staff of the exhausted and decrepit 
pilgrim shall become the palm of the immortal 
athlete!" 4 

When we are dead fifty years, we may not have 
any one to remember us as nicely and heartily as 
the old gentleman remembered his mother, but this 
is an iron fact, unbreakable and lasting, that if 
we do exert a holy, strong influence in the home- 
world and in every other world we enter and leave 
during the day, some one will remember us, if not 
by name, certainly by our good deeds. 

St. Augustine thus describes the death of his 
mother, St. Monica, who had borne him not only 
into the world by her sufferings, but also brought 
him forth into the Catholic Church by her un- 
ceasing tears. In his confessions he says: "In 
the ninth day therefore of her illness, in the fifty- 
sixth year of her age, that devout and holy soul 
was released from her body. I closed her eyes. 

*Talmage. 



OLD FAMILIAR THINGS 27 

Grief took possession of my very soul, and poured 
itself out in tears, so that my eyes with the violence 
of my sorrow wept themselves dry, and I suffered 
greatly from this anguish of sadness. . . . 
Nor did we deem it fitting to celebrate that death 
with murmuring tears and groans, this being the 
ordinary way of showing grief for a certain desti- 
tution, or sort of total extinction, which men at- 
tribute to the dead. But she neither died unhappily 
nor was hers any death at all. This was firmly 
impressed on our minds both by the unerring 
example of her conduct and by her genuine faith." 

Thus did a Saint weep for his mother, also a 
Saint, and acknowledge her influence on his soul. 
Augustine speaks most tenderly of his mother's 
loss, as may be seen from the suffering he experi- 
enced after the burial. 

"When the body was removed, we returned tear- 
less to our home; for I did not weep even during 
the prayers we prayed to Thee, as the Sacrifice 
of our redemption was offered for her when the 
corpse was placed by the grave before it was 
lowered, according to the usual rite, but all day 
long I suffered great anguish of heart, and in my 
agitation, I asked Thee as best I could to calm 
my grief, yet Thou wouldst not. . . . Then 
I slept and on awakening found my grief not a 
little softened, and being as I was in the solitude 
of my bed, those true verses of Thy servant Am- 
brose occurred to my mind; for Thou art 

Maker of all, the Lord 

And Ruler of the height, 

Who, robing day in light, hast poured 

Soft slumbers o'er the night, 

That to our limbs the power 



28 THE HOME WORLD 

Of toil may be renewed, 

And hearts be raised that 9ink and cower, 

And sorrows be subdued." 5 

The prayer he offers Our Lord in her behalf 
is affecting in its fervor and simple faith. He 
begs mercy for the sins of his mother. "Forgive 
her, O Lord, forgive her, I beseech Thee, and 
enter not into judgment with her." He urges Our 
Lord to remember that Monica desired nothing 
more than to be commemorated at the altar "which 
she had served without a single day's intermis- 
sion. From the altar she knew that the Holy 
Victim is dispensed, by Whom the handwriting 
that was against us is blotted out. . . . Thy 
handmaid enchained her soul to His sacrament 
of our redemption by the bond of faith. Let no 
one withdraw her from Thy protecting arm. 
. . . May she rest, then, in peace. . . ." 

^Confessions. 



CHAPTER III 

BUILDING THE HOME 



H 



we must meet those who are nearest and 
dearest to us and shape their lives for better or 
worse. Here in the home is erected the altar of 
the best human love. "Home," said a certain 
Jesuit, "means the bonds of blood and ties of 
tenderness which clasp into one close intimacy the 
hearts of those who, hand in hand, journey- 
Heavenward. Home is the moral circle within 
which minds and hearts share the same shelter, 
breathe the same atmosphere, bear the same bur- 
dens, sympathize in the same sorrows, enjoy the 
same pleasures, divide the same toils, and con- 
tribute to the same success." 1 

Building this home is very important. "If your 
life were but a fever-fit — the madness of a night, 
whose follies were all to be forgotten in the dawn, 
it might matter little how you fretted away the 
sickly hours, what toys you snatched at or let 
fall — what visions you followed wistfully with the 
deceived eyes of sleepless frenzy." 3 

But your life is bound up with others. You are 
creating a world and you are not God. When the 
parent nest has grown too small for you, and your 
heart begins to sigh after your own home, as dear 
a home too, as the one you leave, then it is neces- 

iKane, The Plain Gold Ring. 2 Ruskin. 
29 



30 THE HOME WORLD 

sary to look for the firmest foundation on which 
to create your world. And be not afraid to speak 
of your hopes and your love. Today, this silence 
is harmful, a real bane on family life. Love is 
not merely a rhyme for dove ; love is not a thing 
to hide in shame. Let no one sneer you into a 
blush for your honest affection. Father Kane 
speaks bluntly on this matter of "Love's Young 
Dream." 

"Do not misunderstand, do not misjudge, the 
noblest instinct of human life. Alas! alas! there 
is nothing true, nothing good, nothing noble, noth- 
\ ing beautiful in human life, that has not its carica- 
ture. There is nothing lovable that is not ex- 
posed to the sneer of the conceited cynic, or to the 
laughter of the vulgar fool. What is most sacred 
in its majesty may, by a cunning buffoon, be made 
to look grotesque. What is most exquisite in its 
simplicity may appear contemptible in the eyes of 
a stupid student. Thus even love has been warped 
into meaning either what in human idiocy is most 
silly, or what in human brutishness is most foul. 
Of such meanings I do not speak. I do not speak 
of love that is false. I speak of love that is 
true." 3 

What then is to be the foundation of your home- 
world, the sustainer of love's altar, the material 
expression of your rosy dream? "Unless the 
Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build 
it." 4 Here is a direct, positive answer. The 
Lord is your home's foundation, and if you build 
your love on Him, you will build higher than the 
Tower of Babel, for you will really reach Divinity 
in His own home. You will touch the beauty of 
the sky and lift up by your influence many, many 

*The Plain Gold Ring. *Psalm cxxvi. 



BUILDING THE HOME 31 

[ souls to look into God's Face.) The Jews had 
been building the great Temple' of God and be- 
came discouraged when the neighboring nations 
obstructed the work. Then the Holy Spirit re- 

/ minded them that the works of man are nothing 

[ unless God has the first place. \It is God who 
helps the builders, God who actually builds; and 
the house is God's after it is built. Trust in God 
if you want to lay the foundations of your home 
strongly. Pray to Him with your whole heart 
and work as if the whole house depended on your 
own individual efforts. Then your home will be 
a beautiful thing, mighty, massive and majestic, 
resting secure as a mountain on its base in the 
Hand of God. Whose fingers set the sun and 
moon and stars in the heavens? Whose hand 
holds up the skies? Whose arm is the firm sup- 
port of the earth? Who wears the jewelled 
heavens on his finger even as you wear your ring? 
Can you doubt that He, will hold up your home, 

I if you build it on Him? y 

Indeed, we must build on God and for God. 
Even though we seem to live in a world all our 
own, set aside from spheres inhabited by other 
mortals, we are not, in reality, alone, for there 
ever rests with us the obligation of building our 
home for God in the centre of our hearts. This is 
a loftier building than the dwelling-place physical, 
for it must be made to welcome none other than 
the God for whom the Universe is small, whom 
the doors of heaven welcome only by lifting up 
the gates. We cannot welcome Him or ask His 
help in building our homes until we have stripped 
self of all its mean, arbitrary and senseless de- 
mands. This majestic Dweller, this Guest must 



32 THE HOME WORLD 

have the whole place for Himself since it is said 
that He is a jealous God. If our hearts are to 
be the Inn where God takes His rest, we must 
scour it, and cleanse it, and furnish it, furbish it 
and yet again purify it, till self is not even a speck 
of dust on the glittering bright walls. 

So, this matter of building a home on God 
demands the building of a home for God in our 
hearts, and see how much we gain by welcoming 
God into our souls ! We exchange the world for 
its Maker; the toy for the designer; the tinsel 
for the gold. ( By bringing Him into our homes 
we bring love into our hearts, pleasure into our 
: lives, and the trifling loss of earthly pleasures 
will not even be felt when we greet this Guest, 
look into His eyes and suddenly discover there 
the source of all beauty, all pleasure, all happi- 
ness. This is the home of the heart and God is 
waiting for each one to build it, and just as you 
are anxious about the material home which will 
house your loved ones, and decide at last that the 
only safe foundation is God Himself, so you will 
find that the interior home of your own heart 
must first shelter God. 

We are imbued with a good quality, American 
resourcefulness. If we start something, we see it 
through. This is good, for it implies firm pur- 
pose, resolute will, and the mastership of difficul- 
ties. But there is also the danger that we may 
build our works on ourselves. Analyze yourself 
and you must come to the sad conclusion that you 
are dust. Now dust is a wavering foundation, 
and be American in your hard-headed business 
sense and realize that a dust-foundation never yet 
made a happy home. Too many homes are built 



BUILDING THE HOME 33 

on dust. Too many families work alone, as if 
there were no God. They waste their strength; 
they are pouring into their hearts the bitterness 
of future tears. Let the One who built the lily 
and clothed it more beautifully than Solomon, let 
Him have a hand in the house with your children, 
your friends. If He knows how to build a tree, 
He will know how to help you in the fabric of 
your home. If He can make a blade of grass 
grow, create an Angel, make out of nothing a 
creature like the Blessed Virgin Mary, He is 
worth while having in the house. The world is 
God's and you cannot get rid of Him. 

Suppose you do not call on God's help in caring 
for your home. What will you do by yourself? 
Have you seen a man rake dry autumn leaves 
into a heap and set a match to them? Have you 
watched the sudden bright glow, the leap of the 
flame, the swift destruction? And look intently 
at the insignificant heap of charred leaves, a hil- 
lock of dust for the winds to sport with. That 
is what a man does when he attempts anything 
without God. He builds a sad gray ruin for a 
tramp wind to whistle through. 

The sandy beach at Atlantic City is a delight 
to the eye. There is hardness to it, a firmness 
which does not show your footprint. Indeed there 
would be no poetical sands of time at Atlantic 
City. Now would you dare to build your home 
even on that sand? Watch the child scoop up 
a bucket of the loose stuff, for that is just what 
the sand on that magnificent beach is, loose stuff, 
but a lot of it together. A pillar of sand will not 
support itself. Would you build your home on it ? 

And then walk along the beach and look out 



34 THE HOME WORLD 

at the waves; hear the roar and thunder of their 
fall; see the menace of their sullen rise; see the 
bared white fangs of the spray as the waters curl 
high and leap at the shore ; see how the surf licks 
up the sand, grinds it ravenously, and swallows 
it; listen to the foul hissing as the waves slink 
back into the deep. Suppose you built your home 
there on that fine beach. Where would it be now? 
Yet that is what you do when you build your 
home or your children's character or anything else 
without God — you build on a pillar of loose sand 
in sight of the sea-devil's open mouth, with his 
white fangs grinning expectantly. 

Without God you can do nothing, and this 
should be remembered when the home-world is 
sunny or sad. Who but God can help you bear 
the grief of loneliness when you come home from 
the graveyard and sit down in the darkened room 
yearning for the one who will come no more into 
your little world? You go through the house 
and see the rocking chair she preferred. You 
come suddenly on her sewing basket ! The needles 
are so idle now. Her swift, graceful fingers are 
strangely still and stiff. No more will they en- 
gage in the homely work of mending or making. 
Sometimes you can hear her step on the stairs. 
You call out her name, forgetting that her ears 
are filled with dust. When the night comes and 
you sit at the table alone, you may fall into a 
doze, and awake suddenly, thinking you see her 
looking at you. But — her eyes are filled with 
dust. Sometimes she sang carelessly as she 
worked about your home-world and now perhaps 
you hear the echo of her tones. Listen! Is not 
that her voice echoing through the upper rooms? 



BUILDING THE HOME 3S 

Can't you hear it? The same song you were so 
fond of? But — you know that her mouth is filled 
with dust and no music will brighten your home* 
world again. 

Then it is nice to sit down and think that you 
and she built your home on God. You did not 
work by yourselves though you worked so hard 
together. God was your support then and He 
is holding her in His hand now. You know that 
she does not wish to come back to you, for once 
she has seen God, all her soul is flooded with, 
peace. She has at last gone into the home-world 
for which we are all destined, and if we do not 
reach it at last, we have built in vain. 

St. Paul urged the Corinthians to build on God. 
"You are the house of God," he told them, and 
that means that you are built by God, on God» 
and God dwells in you. He made you His home. 
St. Paul adds: "As a wise architect I have laid 
the foundation, but another builds." Now we 
know that if the chief architect of the great uni- 
verse is absent from the planning and the actual 
building, then men build in vain, be they Corinth- 
ians of an age gone into the maw of time or re- 
sourceful Americans leaping into the marvellous 
future. 

St. Matthew tells us who this great chief archi- 
tect is. "Upon this rock I will build My Church," 
said Christ to Peter, and if we learn from Him, we 
will build on the rock of Peter and of Christ. 
('.With God for the foundation your home will 
\ stand up against any storm that blows. An earth- 
| quake may rock the world as your hand rocks the 
I cradle. Your home will not tremble. Fire, water, 
; wind and wave may hiss, pound, shriek and rum- 



36 THE HOME WORLD 

ble against your cottage walls. That cottage is 
your castle and nothing will break it down. You 
read of huge impregnable fortresses crumpled up 
during the war by siege guns built to knock them 
into heaps of broken stone and distorted steel. 
No gun will ever be built to knock your home into 
a hapless mass of ruins — if, ah — if you built your 
home on God. 

This is splendid practical advice to the young 
married man building his home. "Deny yourself 
all superfluities and all luxuries until you can say, 
'Everything in this house is mine, thank God, 
every timber, every brick, every foot of plumbing, 
every doorsill.' Do not have your children born 
in a boarding house and do not yourself be buried 
from one. Have a place where your children can 
shout and sing and romp without being over- 
hauled for the racket. Have a kitchen where 
you can do something toward the reformation of 
evil cookery and the lessening of this nation of 
dyspeptics. As Napoleon lost one of his great 
battles by an attack of indigestion, so, many men 
have such a daily wrestle with the food swallowed 
that they have no strength left for the battle of 
life." 5 

And in building your home it is well to recall 
what Ruskin said: 

"The one point you may be assured of is this, 
that your happiness does not at all depend on the 
size of your house . . . but depends entirely 
on your having peaceful and safe possession of it 
— on your habits of keeping it clean and in order 
— on the material of it being trustworthy, if they 
are no more than stone and turf — and on your 
contentment with it, so that gradually you may 

e Talmage. 



BUILDING THE HOME 37 

mend it to your mind, day by day, and leave it 
to your children a better house than it was. To 
your children and to theirs, desiring for them that 
they may live as you have lived; and not strive 
to forget you, and stammer when any one asks 
who you were, because, forsooth, they have be- 
come fine folks by your help." 

You will like this reflection of the poet Southey 
that a house is never perfectly furnished for en- 
joyment unless there is in it a child rising three 
years old, and a kitten rising three weeks. "The 
more womanly a woman is," says a writer on 
home affairs, "the more she is sure to throw her 
personality over her home, and transform it from 
a mere eating and sleeping place or an uphol- 
sterer's show-room, into a sort of outermost gar- 
ment of her soul." 

Finally, when the home is built, the woman 
should remember that "it is a woman and only a 
woman — a woman all by herself, if she likes, and 
without any man to help her — who can turn a 
house into a home." 7 And if the building of the 
house depends so much on the man to make the 
house a home, it seems to be the peculiar gift of 
the woman, and yet it would seem that the woman 
mentioned is not so much the husband's wife as 
the mother of his children. Yes, and mothering 
the poor man too, since by himself he has a ten- 
dency toward barbarism and savagery. Man 
would never build a house if he had no woman or 
child for whom to build it. 

*Fors Clavigera, T Cobbe. 



CHAPTER IV 

RULING THE HOME 

ONCE the home-world has been builded, it 
it must be ruled. This is as important as 
the building. A fine strong house with a witless 
master is folly. You may have seen a drunken 
driver beating a noble, thoroughbred horse and 
you said in your heart: "Well, that horse has 
more nobility than the driver." If you build your 
home-world well and then leave it to itself, with- 
out rules, ruler or ruled, you will be as senseless 
as the drunken driver. ) You will have a fine piece 
of property and you will know only how to abuse 
it. 

Who should rule the home? The word "hus- 
band" means "the master of the house," and so 
answers our question. Now, should he rule alone? 
Put the answer diplomatically in this way: "The 
father is President and the mother is his wife." 
Then, as often happens, it is most likely that the 
home is ruled by the President's wife. 

You remember the story of the great Athenian, 
Themistocles. He seemed averse to the cares of 
children, and, to his wife's petition, the learned 
pagan answered: 

"The Athenians rule the Greeks. I rule" the 
Athenians. You rule me. Shall a child rule you ? 
Be careful that a foolish baby does nof govern 
all Greece." 

38 



RULING THE HOME 39 

Of course, Themistocles said this with a smile 

but he should have paused when he said: "You 

rule me." That was the end of the answer; for, 

; if his wife ruled him, then she ruled all the 

Greeks. 

So it is with the rulers of the home world . The 
husband rules the home, and the wife rules the 
. husband, and the children rule both mother and 
father, at least nowadays. In old times the father 
was the stern commander. There was never any 
doubt as to the ruler, and those old days were 
good for this among many other things, that they 
clearly defined rights and duties and imposed 
clear-cut obligations on the commander and the 
commanded. 

The father then must rule. The mother also 
must rule, though the word "wife" meant, once 
on a time, "weaver," and this position would 
seem to deny all rule except in immediate do- 
mestic affairs, such as clothes and food. Hence 
the government of the home-world is not a mon- 
archy nor an aristocracy nor a democracy. It is 
a duocracy with monarchistic tendencies. In plain 
American this means that at the beginning of 
married life the bride and groom hold the reins 
of government, but before the end of the first 
year and forever after, the woman is the ruler and 
the man is a silent advisory board. Themistocles 
is good authority for this. Holy Scripture, how- 
ever, is quite blunt on this subject. "To the 
woman also He said: I will multiply thy sor- 
rows and thy conceptions. In sorrow shalt thou 
bring forth children, and thou shalt be under thy 
husband's power, and he shall have dominion over 
thee." 1 

x Gen. iii, 16. 



40 THE HOME WORLD 



If, then, the father and mother are to rule the 
home, they must first rule themselves. The only 
way to learn how to command is to obey. It is 
absurd to try to steer a rowboat when you do not 
know how to row. We want to be Colonels and 
Captains before we learn how to march and shoot 
a rifle like a private. Imagine a Colonel ordering 
his men into the jaws of death and then looking 
up Webster's dictionary to find out what the jaws 
of death mean! 

You think it is easy to rule yourself? Then, is 
the home-world free from swearing? From ly- 
ing? Do you watch your words before the chil- 
dren? You may be entertaining your best friend 
at the dinner table and in telling of your fishing 
trip during the summer, the black lie slips out 
quite naturally. "I brought home fifty porgies," 
you say, and Mame knows there were only thirty- 
five. So does little Jane, whose sharp ears are 
wide open to the lie. You may excuse yourself by 
saying that fishing-stories are naturally white lies 
and universally popular, but does Jane know this? 
Your friend does. 

Or you come home from work and the tea is 
cold. Then the nasty word leaps out from behind 
the barriers of your teeth, and shocks your wife 
and Jane and Tommy. Next day the boy goes 
out to shoot marbles and tries to imitate your ex- 
plosive manner of saying that the tea is cold. 
Tommy is admired by his cronies and explains the 
source of his knowledge : 

"Huh! My father said dat. He can swear 
some, he can." 

Is it so easy, after all, to rule yourself? 

In Macbeth there is a scene with a tragic humor 



RULING THE HOME 41 

in it, tragic because of the setting, since both 
mother and son will be murdered; humorous be- 
cause Shakespeare has made the child speak a 
wisdom beyond his years, and has surprised Lady 
Macduff into a queer designation of her son. The 
father has fled to escape the murderous Macbeth 
and the mother thinks for the moment that he has 
deserted her. The boy asks: 

"Was my father a traitor, mother?" 

"Ay, that he was." 

"What is a traitor?" 

"Why, one that swears and lies." 

"And be all traitors that do so?" 

"Every one that does so is a traitor and must 
be hanged." 

"And must they all be hanged, that swear and 
lie?" 

"Every one." 

"Who must hang them?" 

"Why, the honest men." 

"Then the liars and swearers are fools; for 
there are liars and swearers enough to beat the 
honest men, and hang up them." 

Lady Macduff is so surprised at this filial wis- 
dom that she exclaims: 

"Now God help thee, poor monkey!" 

Setting aside this uncomplimentary epithet, the 
boy, you will notice, spoke a deal of truth. And 
does not the epithet imply that the boy had heard 
this said before and was only imitating some one 
in repeating it now? So much for the quick eyes 
and ears of children and the need for the greatest 
care when they are watching us. You may have 
seen a child in a corner hunched up and forgotten, 
unnoticed by his gossiping elders, with hands em- 



42 THE HOME WORLD 

bracing cheeks, and knees drawn up under his 
chin. Look at the eyes. They are big with the 
interest of innocence. Knowledge is speeding 
into that white brain. You may blot the soul for- 
ever by rehearsing a scandal. Remember that: 

"A foolish son is the grief of his father: and 
a wrangling wife is like a roof continually drop- 
ping through. House and riches are given by 
parents; but a prudent wife is properly from the 
Lord." 2 

"He that hath found a good wife hath found 
a good thing, and shall receive a pleasure from 
the Lord." 3 

The young Macduff reduced the world to 
swearers and liars those who do not swear or lie. 
It was a simple matter of addition for him — the 
number of swearers being greater than the number 
of non-swearers. Hence his conclusion that the 
swearers were fools to permit themselves to be 
hanged up by the honest men. Or perhaps we 
should be numbered among the honest men and be 
beaten and hanged by the vast majority of 
swearers and liars. This may console us but you 
know in your heart whether, in accepting such 
consolation, you are really lying to yourself and 
so putting yourself outside the few honest men. 
Many a man has been his own worst liar and you 
have heard men damn themselves, yes, swear even 
by the Holy Name, though, thank God, this is 
now rare among Catholics. 

Read this quaint description of the father who 
is careless with his children and careful with his 
horse. "It is a pity that, commonly, more care 
is had, yea, and that among very wise men, to 
find out rather a cunning man for their horse than 

■Prov. xix, 13-14. s Ibid. iv, 18. 



RULING THE HOME 43 

a cunning man for their children. They say nay 
in word, but they do so in deed. For to one they 
will gladly give a stipend of two hundred crowns 
a year, and are loth to offer the other two hun- 
dred shillings. God that sitteth in heaven, laugh- 
eth their choice to scorn, and rewardeth their 
liberality as it should. For he suffereth them to 
have tame and well-ordered horses, but wild and 
unfortunate children. And therefore in the end 
they find more pleasure in their horse than com- 
fort in their children."* 
Ji / The rulers of the home must have the same 
V^/ policy. There must be union of purpose among 
them and this is symbolized by the wedding ring. 
I Now why is the fourth finger of the left hand the 
ring finger? You will be surprised at the answer 
St. Ambrose gives. The fourth finger is the ring 
finger because it has a vein running straight to 
the heart. Hence the ring binding the finger binds 
the heart. The ring is the outward expression 
of the captive heart. The circlet of gold put on 
the bride's finger circles her love and binds it to 
her husband. Hence, if husband and wife are 
to rule the home-world they must have a policy 
p which is in keeping with the love symbolized by 
the wedding ring. 

"Is it true," a stout physician was asked, "about 
this vein running from the fourth finger back to 
the heart?" 

He laughed in amused disgust. He was ex- 
pected to laugh and we were not put out by his 
cynicism. And even if the whole story is physio- 
logically false, the lesson remains, the lesson of 
love, mutual love, taught and expressed by the 
ring. This is the love husband and wife should 

♦Roger Ascham. 



<a^ 



44 THE HOME WORLD 

have in ruling the domain of home. Anyway, 
why is the ring on the fourth finger? Let the 
cynics answer. 

There is a gentleman of noble bearing and 
handsome appearance who attracts quiet attention 
by the thick gold band he wears on his finger. 
His wife is dead and this is her wedding ring. 
But all around the ring the flesh rises in regular 
mountains, so that there is formed a deep gold 
valley. Somehow or other this gentleman got the 
ring on his finger. Nothing will take it off but 
a sharp file. The ring is of the old-fashioned 
kind, very broad and heavy, and at first glance 
you would think it caused great pain. If you 
mentioned this to our friend, he would shake his 
head and say: 

"Oh, no ! Not at all. The finger is used to it 
now. You see, she died ten years ago and that is 
a long time. The ring comes off with the finger." 

Such love is a thrilling thing to see. One of 
this man's sons told a story about his father. 

"Pop has always been touchy since Mom died. 
So when one day at dinner at the shop, a brazen- 
mouthed superintendent said: 'Gosh, John! You 
ought to get married again! You're young, and 
handsome and got money — ' That was all the 
fellow could say, for a chair was pushed back 
hurriedly and if it had not been for two men on 
either arm, the brazen mouth would have been 
closed, perhaps by a crack with the wedding ring. 
Anyhow, the man begged Pop's pardon and the 
thunderstorm blew off." 

This husband still remembered the little maid 
to whom he said : "With this ring I thee wed," 
and though she has gone ahead of him into the 



RULING THE HOME 45 

dimness of the future, he will carry her ring to 
her very faithfully. St. Gregory said this about 
marriage : 

"I put the two right hands each to each, and I 
join them with the hands of God." 

That is the principle on which the gentleman 
acts. He supposes that God's hand is holding his 
wife, and the other is stretched out for him, and 
though there are no marriages in Heaven, still 
old loves will remain tender and sweet, through- 
out eternity. 

Now hear the praise of a wise woman for 
whom such a gentleman wears his ring. Scripture 
cries out: "Who shall find a valiant woman? 
Far and from the uttermost coasts is the price 
of her. The heart of her husband trusteth in 
her, and he shall have no need of spoils. She 
will render him good, and not evil, all the days 
of her life. . . . She hath opened her hand 
to the needy, and stretched out her hands to the 
poor. She shall not fear for her house in the 
cold of snow; for all her domestics are clothed 
with double garments. . . . Strength and 
beauty are her clothing, and she shall laugh in 
the latter day. . . . She hath looked well to 
the paths of her house, and hath not eaten her 
bread idle. Her children rose up, and called her 
blessed; her husband, and he praised her. Many 
daughters have gathered together riches; thou 
hast surpassed them all. Favor is deceitful, and 
beauty is vain; the woman that feareth the Lord, 
she shall be praised." 5 

Nowadays the presence of such a valiant 
mother in the home means that the home is well 
guided in its destinies. The daughters are not 

6 Prov. xxxi. 



46 THE HOME WORLD 

affected by the leprosy of dress, and the boys are 
growing into stalwart men of God. This valiant 
woman will see that discipline guides the home 
and, according to St. Cyprian, discipline is the 
guardian of hope, supports faith, and leads us on 
the road of salvation. Discipline, too, is the nour- 
ishment of a good character, a mistress of virtue, 
and virtue is the only sure defense of happiness. 
St. Augustine remarks that where discipline is 
repressed wickedness rages unpunished. 

Incalculable is the influence of the mother on 
her son. How bitterly is he assaulted by the 
storms of corrupt nature! He "is prone to evil 
from his youth," and must be taught the ways of 
God, to keep the law, like Tobias's son, "whom 
the father taught to fear God from his infancy 
and to keep away from all sin." 6 The son needs 
God's law because the body when strong becomes 
insistent in its demands, and without the experi- 
ence of mature life, sober prudence and caution 
are not likely to be the elements steering the boy's 
course in the seething currents. When the sailor 
does not know the channel ahead, he anchors or 
makes slow, tedious progress, to the shrieking of 
fog-sirens and warning calls from neighboring 
ships. Now the boy must know that the map of 
his course is the law of God; that purity and in- 
nocence are the virtues his mother most desires 
and delights in, and that his own flesh is treach- 
erous and unreliable. Is not a treacherous friend 
worse than an open enemy? 

To whom can the son go, if not to his father 
and mother in these early struggles, and whose 
is the voice that cries out the warning to him 
when sin allures? Why, it is the mother's; and 



RULING THE HOME 47 

his reverence for her will never permit him to 
put his foot in the gutter or thrust any one further 
into the slime. The pure white light about his 
mother's head, her searching glance into his eyes, 
will be the deterrents from evil by natural motives, 
and the laws of God which she taught, will guide 
him clear and safe into harbor. Besides her in- 
fluence on the boy, the valiant woman must guide 
her daughters. St. Augustine said that the thing 
which pleases passes quickly, and that which pains 
remains forever. And by this he meant that even 
hard-headed business men often make the ex- 
change of a sinful pleasure enduring for the mo- 
ment, at the risk of eternal pain. 

This saying may be applied to the daughter 
whose temptation nowadays is to win false ad- 
miration at the risk of innocence. She is attacked 
like most of the women of today, with the leprosy 
of dress; she wears clothes to entice; to win the 
eyes of men ; forgetting all the time that men love 
not the immodest woman but kneel in humble 
tribute to the woman adorned with her good life. 
This is the evil today with the daughters of the 
house and it is the duty of the mother to rule her 
home in modesty, purity and innocence. When 
clothes are worn not for warmth but for color; 
not to hide the body but to show it; not to pro- 
tect maidens from the lecherous looks of loose 
men but to attract such, then we are confronted 
with what the Scripture calls "the leprosy of 
dress," and sooner or later putrid spots of the 
disease may be found on the soul. 

If the boy looks to his mother in reverence and 
love and keeps himself in the narrow path because 
she taught him at her knee the law of his God, 



4 8 



THE HOME WORLD 









/ 



1) 



I 



all the more important and just is it to expect 
that the mother's influence will deter her daughter 
from the "leprosy of dress" which is epidemic, 
and slaying more souls than the Spanish Influenza 
slew bodies. 

Agreement between husband and wife is true 
riches, the greatest wealth, and is necessary if the 
home is to be ruled well. If concord reigns, pov- 
erty has no burdens; low station in life is blessed 
by peace and joy; the two-story house in the side 
street is the home of keenest pleasure, and over 
it smile skies forever calm. On the contrary, 
those who lose concord and spend their lives in 
disagreeable quarreling, even though they be rich 
with all the gold and diamonds in the mines of the 
earth, are poorer than you, and their banquet 
tables groan with untouched delicacies. Their 
palates are soured by discord. There is a heart 
vacuum in such homes. Peace has folded her 
wings and fled, shielding her face from the frowns 
that scandalize little children. 

The husband suspects evil of the wife, and both 
are planning how to say biting things, how to 
wound the heart and salt the wound. The bitter- 
ness of gall is the portion of such a husband and 
wife who will not agree one with the other in 
mutual forbearance; who will not recognize their 
faults and, at least, compromise. If the home is 
not absolutely built on compromises, still it is true 
that tranquillity in a home is very often saved by 
Trials must infallibly come. The love of 
usband and wife will be sorely tried, but these 
trials, if accepted humbly by both parties, will 
draw them nearer each other and closer to God. 
There must be a sincere, good purpose in family 



RULING THE HOME 49 

troubles or else you are forced to admit that God 
torments His people just to see them wriggle, and 
this would be utter blasphemy. 

God's grace is ours all the time, let us hope, 
but more abundantly when we are in trouble. 
Then, though the soul be agonized and the eyes 
red with salt tears, God is near with His wealth 
of grace. Take the wealth at the small price of 
tears. As a result peace will rule your home; 
domestic serenity will be strengthened at every 
repression of anger. Choke down the savage 
word and you make your home happier. You 
come back to it from your day's work not with 
ill feelings of resentment, but as the sailor boy 
comes home from the storms of the sea. Con- 
solation is yours here and nowhere else, and a 
smiling wife will smooth out the furrows on your 
brow. 

Will the wise wife bother her husband with 
domestic difficulties encountered during the day? 
Will she not rather let him grumble and moan 
awhile over the troubles of his daily work and 
then when a good supper has been eaten, and the 
old pipe lighted, and the book or newspaper 
opened, she may entertain him with the story of 
the huckster who cheated her as she bought beans, 
or how Johnny fought with the bad boy next door 
and gave him a bloody nose. There is a simple 
prudence needed in the wife, and the first rule of 
it is the one mysteriously handed down from gen- 
eration to generation of women, that the quickest 
road to a man's heart is via a comfortably lined 
stomach. The application of this homely truth 
would have prevented much unpleasant quarreling 
and certainly saved some sensational family his- 






50 THE HOME WORLD 

tones from being aired in the divorce courts. 

Far back in the fourth century, St. Chrysostom 
urged this concord and prudence on, husband and 
wife. He says that when peace and love bind 
together man and wife, all riches is theirs and 
the happiness of their home is protected by a solid, 
unbreakable wall. 7 

The children are quick to notice quarrels be- 
tween mother and father. Also, they notice the 
tranquillity of their homes just as readily, and will 
imitate the one as they will the other. Introduce 
this peace into your home if you have lost it, and 
if you have always kept it, thank God for His 
larger bounty to you and yours. He has been 
very good to you. And the best of all this peace 
is the knowledge that somewhere in the future 
your children will enjoy it, because they will imi- 
tate you in striving for it. 

There can be no doubt but that when you really 
prefer God to all other things in your home-life, 
even to the petty gratification of overcoming your 
wife or husband in a quarrel, His divine gen- 
erosity will richly reward you. 

With a husband in the home who loves his wife 
as Christ loved the Church; with a wife and 
mother in whom can be verified what the Scripture 
says of the valiant woman; with love, mutual help, 
and good example to sons and daughters; with 
God as the foundation — tell me, if you can, of a 
world more beautiful, more happy, more blessed 
in the sight of God and His Angels, of Christ and 
His Mother, than this little world of home? 

*HomiIy xxxviii, on Genesis. 









CHAPTER V 
/ HAPPINESS AT HOME 

HOME is the source of our happiness and yer 
it is passing strange how men will forever 
seek happiness otherwheres. Why is this mistake 
made? 

Every one ardently desires to be happy. Such 
a desire is the expression of the fundamental ten- 
dency of our nature. Man is not self-sufficient. 
He needs things, he needs a hand to hold his, a 
shoulder to rest against when he is weak, a breast 
to weep on when he is sorrowful. Man is a de- 
pendent creature and the mistake of many, many 
men is in thinking that they can do very well with- 
out assistance either from God or man. 

Naturally then, these unfortunates consider that 
they can attain complete happiness in this life. 
They investigate the things around them — satisfy 
the eye, the ear, the touch, the tongue and the 
sight — and still remain with unquenched thirst for 
happiness. They tested the world and its won- 
ders, found them good and beautiful, but like the 
moisture on the parlor window when the ther- 
mometer registers thirty below, or like the wild 
rose that delights for a day and then droops and 
dies these joys are fleeting, mere feathers 
blown in air. The moisture may be wiped off 
easily. The flower dies the moment it matures, 
si 



52 THE HOME WORLD 

While we stand admiring a rose, the sun begins to 
scorch it, the wind pulls at the petals, insects eat 
out its honeyed heart. Such is happiness, obtained 
from the world, as fleeting as the rose, as easily 
wiped away as the moisture on the window. Very 
aptly may we apply to happiness what Herrick 
said of the flower: 

And this same flower that smiles today 
Tomorrow will be dying. 

Like the flowers we too, are but the transient be- 
ings of a few moments. 

The cloud-capt towers, the gorgeous palaces, 
The solemn temples, the great globe itself, 
Yea, all which it inherits, shall dissolve: 
And, like the baseless fabric of a vision, 
Leave not a wreck behind! We are such stuff 
As dreams are made on, and our little life 
Is rounded with a sleep. 1 

The thought makes us pause, but it should not 
discourage. Indeed, it is a blessing from God to 
have experienced the unhappiness of the world, 
or rather to have arrived at the conclusion that 
the things around us can give only an evanescent 
joy. We are not really creatures of a day and 
neither is our happiness, for which we yearn with 
all the power of an immortal soul, a thing of a 
few years. We are made for God. He alone 
can satisfy us. He gave us being that He might 
^finally give us Himself. 

There is happiness in life, but to despair when 
we search up and down the ways of life and find 

'Shakespeare. 



HAPPINESS AT HOME 53 

it not, is absurd. You searched in the wrong 
places. You should ask a few knowing persons : 
"Where can I be happy?" It is foolishness to 
imagine that you can imitate the worldly man who 
searches for happiness in the things about him. 
Lift up your heart! God is above you! He is 
Happiness! "The kingdom of God is not food 
and drink, but justice and peace and joy in the 
Holy Spirit," says St. Paul, and only the man who 
can leap out of his sensuality, can be the friend 
of God, His son, His heir, happy in hope, and 
near perpetual joy even in this life. He is surely 
resting on solid enjoyment and unending peace 
who rests on the bosom of God. 

O momentary grace of mortal men, 

Which we more hunt for than the grace of God ! 

Who builds his hope in the air of men's fair looks. 

Lives like a drunken sailor on a mast, 

Ready with every nod to tumble down 

Into the fatal bowels of the deep. 2 

Now the nearest station to Heaven and God is 
the happy home, where His law is observed and 
His love prevails. Home is the earthly abode 
of happiness, for there a man finds his best and 
sweetest joys in the society of his wife, the com- 
panionship of his children and the pleasure of 
welcoming friends. 

Why is it that men will insist on wandering 
away from home in looking for happiness ? It is a 
mystery that finds its only solution in the restless- 
ness of men and their desire for novelty and 
change. Yet true happiness according to our best 
reasoning, and the Scriptures, and even the pagan 

"Shakespeare. 



54 THE HOME WORLD 

■writers, consists not in wanderings and novelties 
but in the peace that comes more from the home- 
world than any other. Christian happiness is not 
to be found in anything except a good conscience. 
Why, what can you find in the world that is more 
. worth while ? Look around you, with St. Cyprian, 
and uncover for yourself the "shadows of this 
shrouded world." You will pity men, and thank 
God for permitting you to escape the world reek- 
ing with blood, infested with savagery, defiled by 
all that is foulest in the actions of man. 

Look at the cities and the rush for happiness 
that makes anemic day of golden night and puts 
the stars to shame when men grovel in the glare 
of false light while the -heavens are calm, pure, 
serene — an example for the higher creature to 
follow. 

Cyprian pictures vividly the debasing effect of 
gladiatorial games in his day, and many things he 
says may be applied to the young and strong of 
today, who, searching for the fleece of happiness, 
slay themselves, their manhood and their souls, in 
the great game of modern life. 

"The body," says he, "is nourished with strong 
foods, and the huge bulk of limbs thrives in its 
brawn and muscle, in order that the pampered vic- 
tim may die a costlier death. ... In the 
flower of their age, beautiful in person, and in 
costly robes, they dress themselves alive for their 
voluntary funeral. . . . They fight with 
beasts not for their crimes but for their madness. 
Fathers are spectators of their own sons; a 
brother is in the ring and his sister close by; and 
though the increased grandeur of the spectacle 
makes additional expense, yet, alas, even the 



{ 



HAPPINESS AT HOME 55 

mother supplies that increase, that she too may be 
present at her own woes." 3 

Shall we mention the havoc wrought among 
men by theatres? Is happiness to be sought where 
wickedness parades shamelessly? The vices of 
paganism are not the source of a Christian's hap- 
piness, and the theatre holds up a mirror in which 
are reflected all the disgraceful, mischievous, and 
contaminating actions of humankind, while the 
bill-boards loudly proclaim : "What has been done, 
may be done once again ! See, how you may sin I" 

Cyprian condemned in strong, emphatic lan- 
guage the vices of his day. As you read this, ask 
yourself if it is as true now: 

"There is no fear of the laws; no apprehension 
of inquisitor or judge; what can be paid for is not 
dreaded; the offense is, among the guilty to be 
guiltless; he who does not imitate the bad, offends 
them. Law has made a compact with crime, and 
guilt has become legal by becoming public. What 
sense of shame, what probity can exist, where bad 
men have none to condemn them, and where none 
are found but ought to be condemned?" 4 And in 
all this, man is anxious to find his happiness. "Sin 
smiles with a face of gladness, but a deep woe is 
under the treacherous attraction." 

The joy of a Christian cannot be in these things. 
It consists first in the forgiveness of his sins and 
in a good and holy conscience. St. Bernard asks: 
"What is richer, what is sweeter for the soul, what 
is more soothing on earth and more secure than 
a good conscience?" And among the pagan 
philosophers this same idea was prevalent. 
Cicero says to Torquatus that a good conscience 
is "the greatest consolation in misfortune," while 

•On the Grace of God. *Ibid. 



56 THE HOME WORLD 

Seneca remarks that other joys do not fill the 
breast but only ease our frowns; and to the man 
anxious for true joy, he says that it comes from a 
good conscience, from upright counsels, from 
good deeds, from the continual pursuit of an even 
road in life whereon man should walk with high 
contempt for accidental misfortunes that beset 
every one. 

The second root of Christian happiness is the 
fear of the Lord. "The fear of the Lord," says 
Holy Scripture, "is honor and glory and gladness, 
and a crown of joy. — The fear of the Lord shall 
delight the heart, and shall give joy and glad- 
ness, and length of days." 5 St. John Chrysostom 
explains that the fear of the Lord is a permanent 
and immovable joy and helps only to happiness so 
much so that we are not affected by evils, since the 
man who fears God as he should and puts his 
trust in Him, has enriched himself with the root 
of all delights, and has discovered the sparkling 
spring of happiness. 

Friendship with God and union with Him in 
prayer will bring us joy, but here we can be selfish 
and follow the advice of Our Lord when He said : 
"Be glad and rejoice, for your reward is very 
great in heaven." 6 Just as the consideration of 
our sins and the fear of judgment make us sad, 
so we can rejoice in balancing our good deeds 
and the reward that is awaiting us. 

These promises of Scripture are born out in the 
total ruin of the man who seeks his happiness in 
the gay highways of the world, f orgetting^ God ; 
forced to lull himself into a pathetic oblivion of 
the truth and beauty around him in order that 
like the Prodigal he may enjoy his false happiness 

'Ecclus. iii. Watt, v, 18. 



HAPPINESS AT HOME 57 

far from God. Is wealth anything but an Incum- 
brance? Is honor more than a bubble? Are 
the pleasures of the forbidden world more than 
vinegar and gall? Does the company of our ad- 
mirers and flatterers and fellow fools on the flow- 
ery path bring us entertainment or disgust? 
Where is that serenity, peace and content which 
should accompany happiness? No! In God and 
His law is your hope for joy, and seeking it any- 
where else is simply putting the dagger to your 
breast, the poison to your lips, and at the end 
there is always the haunting fear in the bad man's 
soul that his mite of joy will be only a trembling 
leaf soon to be blown away on a careless wind, 
leaving him with the dry twig and the dust of his 
regrets. 

Reflecting on the saying that the Psalmist's 
foot had almost slipped when he saw the pros- 
perity of sinners, St. Augustine says: "He wished 
to be happy here, whereas happiness is not here. 
For happiness is a real good and a great good, but 
it has its own region. Christ came from the land 
of happiness, and not even He found it on earth. 
He was scorned and mocked, taken prisoner, 
scourged, loaded with chains, struck by the hand 
of man, defiled by spittle, crowned with thorns, 
hung to a cross: and at last of the Lord are the 
issues of death. . . . Why, then, do you, a 
servant, seek happiness in a place where the issues 
of death are of the Lord?" 

He then goes on to explain how the temptation 
to slip away from the ways of God, had come 
upon the Psalmist. Looking round about him, 
he was suddenly aWare that the good which he 
was striving for by serving God faithfully, evil 



5 8 THE HOME WORLD 

men enjoyed in as marked degree as he did and 
still persisted in their wickedness. He said to 
himself: "I worship God; they blaspheme God. 
They are prosperous; I am wretched. Where is 
justice?" 

St. Augustine rebukes the Psalmist for even 
weighing in the balance such divers things as God's 
service and temporal prosperity; "on which serv- 
ice of God, he had put a low price indeed when 
he sought to exchange it for temporal prosperity. 
. . . Have I desired riches which are passing 
and perishable? What have I desired? Gold, 
the mustiness of the earth? Silver, the strife of 
the earth? Honor, the smoke of time? These 
are the things which I desired from Thee upon 
the earth, and because I saw them in the hands 
of sinners, my feet were almost moved, and my 
steps had well-nigh slipped." 7 

The generality of mankind will find their happi- 
ness in the home-world. 

But happy they! the happiest of their kind! 
Whom gentler stars unite, and in one fate 
Their hearts, their fortunes, and their beings blend. 8 

Peace and plenty are the home's great goods 
even as they are of the city. Cardinal Bellarmine 
says that peace without plenty is the secure pos- 
session of misery. While plenty without peace is 
a happiness doubtful and uncertain. Only when 
the home enjoys both peace and plenty can it be 
completely happy and peace will be the result of 
a good conscience, the fear and love of God. 
Plenty must come from hard work. So in the 
home, if we are to build ourselves a monument 

'Sermon xix. »Young. 



HAPPINESS AT HOME 59 

to happiness, we must work and be observant of 
God's law. 

In the house of a happy man no one is idle. 
He will follow the example of St. Charles Borro- 
meo who portioned out each one's work in such 
a way that there was not a quarter of an hour 
free to any one during the time of labor. What 
must result from this industry and energy? The 
happy home will be happier, for there will be 
order, quiet, efficient progress. The house will 
resound with the laugh of happy toilers and the 
passer-by will stay his steps to rejoice in the merry 
tones. Ease destroys families and work makes 
them happy. Pain and toil are the test of all real 
worth. 

There is the work of the wife and daughters in 
the kitchen, and though it requires courage to 
say this, still it is true, that the woman in the 
house is not a good wife or mother unless she 
can take care of the kitchen. Put the matter more 
bluntly. "Though your wife may know how to 
play on all the musical instruments and rival a 
prima donna, she is not well educated unless she 
can boil an Irish potato and broil a mutton-chop, 
since the diet sometimes decides the fate of famil- 
ies and nations." 9 

, And if you ask yourself: "Who are the great 
men of today and why are they great?" you 
can answer: "For the most part they descended 
from industrious mothers, who, in the old home- 
stead, used to spin their own yarn, and weave 
their own carpets, and plait their own door-mats, 
and flag their own chairs, and do their own work. 
The stalwart men and the influential women of 
this day, ninety-one out of every hundred of them, 

Talmage. 



60 THE HOME WORLD 

came from such an illustrious ancestry of hard 
knuckles and homespun." 10 

All this toil will be of no avail if God has not 
the first place. His precepts should be our mould 
in which to form the children and ourselves. \ 
There can be no poverty where God is, and the 
world will appear but a mean thing if you found 
your happiness in God. "Ceilings embellished 
with gold," says Cyprian, "mansions encrusted 
with slabs of precious marble, will seem poor, 
when you feel that it is yourself who is to be 
waited on, to be garnished, that you are your own 
better house, wherein the Lord sits as in a temple, 
and where the Holy Ghost has begun to dwell. 
Let us array that house with the colors of inno- 
cency, and illumine it with the light of justice; 
age will not decay it; the colors on its walls will 
not change their lustre, nor the gold lose its 
brightness. All tinselled things are transitory 
. . . but this remains in a dress ever fresh, 
in honor untarnished, in brilliancy perpetual." 11 

So do not look far and wide in the highways for 
happiness. You will find it first in your own soul 
and in the world of home. 

"Here below the human race has different kinds 
of enjoyment," according to St. Augustine, "and 
any man is called miserable when that which he 
cares for is taken away from him. Men there- 
fore, love various things, and when a man seems to 
have that which he likes he is called happy- But the 
truly happy man is he who loves what is worthy 
of love, not he who possesses the object of his 
desires. For many men are rather to be pitied 
for having what they love than for being deprived 
of it." Here the Saint brings up the example of 

™Ibid. u The Grace of God. 



HAPPINESS AT HOME 61 

the Gentiles whom God delivered up to the evil 
desires of their hearts, while at the same time He 
refused to listen to the Apostle Paul praying to be 
delivered from the sting of the flesh. "He 
granted their request," says Augustine, "for their 
condemnation, and refused St. Paul for his good. 
But when we love that which God would have 
us love, He will most surely give it to us." 13 

The tall tree is not bothered by the grass at 
its roots, and so the Psalmist says that the wicked 
are sprung up like grass, but the just like the palm- 
tree. The grass withered and the flower fallen, 
is the story of the brief empty prosperity of sin- 
ners compared with the solid abiding joys of the 
just even though grief and sorrow be their por- 
tion. Men lead bad lives and flourish. Our next- 
door neighbor may be a villain and yet own a 
handsome limousine. You go off to work every 
day struggling to keep clothes on the backs of 
your children and bread on the dining table. In 
one malicious manoeuvre your neighbor will 
make ten thousand dollars. You, if you are vir- 
tuous, will make twelve hundred dollars a year. 
To you ten thousand would be a fortune. It 
would repulse all dangers of hunger, thirst and 
nakedness. It would give your boy or girl an 
education. It would give your wife a vacation at 
Atlantic City. But you are virtuous and the price 
of a peck of potatoes worries you. 

And all the while you have but to lift the parlor 
curtain to see the limousine, splendid evidence of 
prosperity in your neighbor's house next-door. 
Will you murmur in your heart thus: "O God, 
I serve Thee and am obedient to Thy law. Do 
the wicked find favor with Thee? Dost Thou 

12 On Psalm xxvi, 6. 



62 THE HOME WORLD 

hate the good?" Then you are near serious temp- 
tation and the footsteps of your desires are close 
to the heels of the wicked man. Then remember 
this saying of the Psalmist: "O Lord, how great 
are Thy works! Thy thoughts are exceeding 
deep." (No depth of ocean can compare with the 
thought of God in His rule over men. St. 
Augustine uses the following comparison to show 
how foolish you are in envying the neighbor his 
car and wealth. "Do not share the pleasure of 
the fish who is relishing his food. It is true the 
fisherman has not drawn in his line, but already 
the fish is biting at the hook. . . . You are 
thinking of your own short days upon earth and 
would have all things fulfilled during their brief 
course. What are these things? That all the 
wicked should be condemned, and all the good be 
crowned. Would you see these things in this 
life of yours? God will carry them out in His 
own time." 13 } 

True it is, that no one is happy in his heart 
whose conscience is stinging him. Envy of the 
neighbor is a sting, but put down the parlor cur- 
tain, walk back through the quiet shaded parlor; 
gaze on the contented face of your wife and the 
happy faces of your children; and then ask your- 
self if your heart is happier here in the home- 
nest than afar in the world with all riches, honor, 
offices and power at your command. Limousines 
may glide by you noiselessly, their occupants be- 
furred and be-laced and not noticing you or your 
home, but, alas, limousines do not always carry 
happy hearts and many of their owners have never 
had your blessing of a home. 

"On Psalm xci. 



CHAPTER VI 

DEALS WITH THE BEAUTY OF AGE; THE FAMILY 

ALBUM AND BABY SHOES; OLD CRADLES; 

HIGH-CHAIRS; GO-CARTS, AND LACE-CAPS. 

OLD things are always attractive. If beauty 
does not mark them with interest, age gen- 
erally has softened the rough edges and made the 
thing presentable. An old ship may be nothing 
but a rotting hulk, yet you would walk far to 
see bows that have nosed the seven seas when your 
grandfather was a bare-legged urchin. Old 
streets lined with weather-stained houses are in 
an atmosphere peculiar to themselves. Especially 
if there are ancient trees with tremendous, spread- 
ing branches, standing along the curb. Many New 
England villages and towns rejoice in such 
dreamy streets, but it is in the city, New York, 
say, that the contrast stands out suddenly like an 
old man's smile on a baby's face. It startles you. 
Everything is so intensely modern all around. 

Fifth Avenue is a swiftly moving stream of 
automobiles in the centre, well dressed, spruce, 
briskly walking pedestrians on either sidewalk, 
and yet a step down the side streets lifts you into 
another world. The grandeur of these old 
houses has departed. Signs for boarders glare 
at you from ornate fronts gone to rust and drab 
gentility. Time has been cruel in moving so per- 
sistently uptown. Certainly it is passing strange 
to be lost in revery before a Colonial doorway 

63 



64 THE HOME WORLD 

and suddenly be warned out of the road by a 
limousine's siren, or to be distracted heavenward 
by the whirr of an aeroplane. You have seen 
very old men sitting on the shady sidewalk of 
some by-street watching the restless youngsters 
rush here and there in a game of kick-the-wicket. 
It is exactly the same thing with an old house, 
or anything old, in fact, in New York City. 

Old churches too, have their fascination. Old 
china, old furniture, old fenders, old stove-lifters 
used, perhaps, by William Penn in his wonderful 
brick house on the Schuylkill are attractive in their 
own order. Old andirons are particularly roman- 
tic, for they speak of a grate-fire that is dead and 
— who knows? — they may have been toyed with 
by shy lovers gazing into the embers for the 
future, or used to crack a man's head in the gen- 
tlemanly days of the past. 

Independence Hall, for instance, and Faneuil 
Hall are good examples of the houses. Old St. 
Joseph's Church in Philadelphia is a wonderful 
example of the churches. Why, the city simply 
built around this church and forgot it. You must 
go up an alley to get to it and if you do not 
know just where Willing's Alley is, you will never 
find the church, for no one on Chestnut Street, 
even though you are right opposite the church, 
will have any idea of its whereabouts. Martha 
Washington's china cups and saucers; George 
Washington's wine-set at Georgetown University; 
the same College's collection of lace and glass- 
ware and signatures, and the things mentioned 
above, will surely convey the idea that old things, 
even robbed of beauty, have their power of at- 
tracting attention. 



THE BEAUTY OF AGE 6s 

Now It has always seemed to me that this at- 
tention is very different from that we pay to 
modern things. This attention may be romantic, 
a voice from the dead, a warning for the future, 
and all that, but principally the difference between 
old things and modern things is not more than a 
difference of time and emotion. We laugh at our 
ancestors and our posterity will laugh at us. 
Some day the airplane will be old and subways a 
thing of romantic interest. But while we are the 
ones looking at the old things, the interest in 
them is emotional for ourselves and, for that rea- 
son, I have a preference for old photographs, 
daguerreotypes and tintypes, while my friend, the 
learned theologian, Dr. Holden, prefers old shoes. 
You never can tell how queer a man is until you 
have found out his hobbies. Ask what a man 
loves and you will know why he lives. Dr. 
Holden let me look into his soul one day, and I 
shall tell you about it later. 

Take down the family album. Turn its pages 
at random and look at your grandfather's or 
your grandmother's face, and see if you don't feel 
queer around the heart. You will certainly smile. 
Now (but do this quietly!) look at your father's 
picture when he was courting your mother. Did 
you ever see your father showing that picture 
around ? Perhaps he wore a marvellous beard and 
perhaps she was dressed in a wonderful skirt. 
You notice how he stands about three feet from 
the circumference of the skirt where it spreads, 
balloon-like, on the floor. Such a skirt nowadays 
would make, well — how many dresses? 

She is sitting and he is standing. She holds a 
parasol and he shows clearly that he does not 



66 THE HOME WORLD 

know just what to do with his other hand. One 
is securely anchored on the back of her chair but 
he looks as if he had a hand too many. He is 
very self-conscious for all his fierce whiskers. 
Perhaps he leans on a cane, not a modern pencil 
but a dog-killer. His hat is almost poetic, espe- 
cially if it be one of those straw affairs with a 
floating wing out of the side. His trousers are 
truly so. But the Brummellian touch in his whole 
dress is the expansive tie, a cravat, you know, and 
the wide heavy rim of gold that stretches across 
his manly chest. The rim of gold is a watch 
chain. Nowadays such a chain would make sev- 
eral wrist watches and the seal, a pair of cuff 
links and a K. of C. emblem besides. 

She wears the cutest, smallest hat, something 
like a small boy's derby with a feather in it. (You 
will pardon me, I know, but I cannot describe a 
lady's hat with any accuracy.) This hat is the 
climax or apex of a costume which seems to be 
built on wide foundations with a tapering roof. 
No disrespect, but the old daguerreotypes and tin- 
types were truthful. At least in all things but the 
rouge on her cheeks and the colors superadded by 
the artist. That rouge on the tintype was the 
only rouge your mother or grandmother ever 
wore. Even the artist saw no need of penciling 
your mother's eyebrows or carmining her lips. 

But you do not look so intently at your mother's 
dress. That brings a smile even to her old eyes. 
Watch her as you show her the picture. Yes! 
See! She smiled. You are enthralled by the 
face. Oh, her youth of the olden days, come 
back again and take her wrinkles away and smooth 
her cheeks and put the red glow of health there 



THE BEAUTY OF AGE 67 

again and the flash back into her eyes and take 
away the gray from her hair and put back the 
self-conscious look she had when she was sitting 
for her picture with her young, stalwart, ner- 
vous and bewhiskered lover. Oh, put them all 
back, yea, even the tie and the chain; yea, even 
the long dresses and the wee hat with the feather ! 
Youth and love and throbbing life and the simple 
purity of soul ! 

So the old pictures talk and sensibly, too, but 
we are like New York and the old houses; like 
Chestnut Street and old St. Joseph's Church. 
The rush of life dims the voice of the past. 

Some of the faces in your family album are re- 
markably strong faces. The eyes of the men are 
stern, fearless, maybe a little careless of danger. 
This will be more apparent if the eyes are Irish. 
It is true of all, for the immigrant was a bold 
man, and if you are from the stock of Americans 
who came over from the old countries in the 
dawn of the continent's history, the same will be 
true since your forefathers were, even as their 
later followers, immigrants. Time does not 
change the nature of the thing itself. America 
is a country of immigrants. The only native 
American is an Indian. 

You will notice, too, that the women in your 
old album have a certain delightful quality about 
their faces. All are serene-looking, quiet, con- 
tented, beautiful. They had such a busy time 
raising large, healthy families that they could not 
grow old fast. They had no empty hands to 
worry over, no empty cradles, no empty high- 
chairs, no childless homes. This, by the way, is 
a contradiction, for no true home is childless even 



68 THE HOME WORLD 

when God denies a young couple children. The 
Infant Jesus reigns there and is a comforting 
Child. In other cases, where the Lord does not 
deny children, well — what do you think if the 
home is empty? Certainly few hands were idle 
in the old days and few people died young. 
Serene women and bold men! Beautiful mothers 
and strong fathers ! And work to keep the deviU 
away! All this the album shows you. 
Surely old photographs are interesting. 
I said something about old shoes. This must 
be a secret between you and me, for Dr. Holden, 
the learned theologian, may not like to have this 
story repeated. Nowadays, everybody might not 
appreciate it and any sort of family emotion is 
frowned down in modern times. This is the 
story of the old shoes as Dr. Holden told it: 

"One day I walked home from the rectory and 
found my old mother sewing in the sitting room 
upstairs. You know the house. Quiet, small, 
with an old chestnut tree looking in at the win- 
dow. She sits there in the bay-window and sews 
for Mary's children. 

"Well, I chatted for a time and then she said: 
" 'Jim, you need a sleep. Your eyes are tired.' 
"I really was tired so I took her advice and 
went into my old room to stretch out in Dad's 
Morris chair. The nap was short and I began 
to rummage in the wardrobe, looking up some 
school books for a boy I have in hand. I came 
across a box and opening it, found ten pairs of 
baby shoes. They * had been misplaced, surely, 
for I never saw them in my cupboard before. 
There were eight in our family and you could pick 
out the six boys' shoes right away. Perhaps even 



THE BEAUTY OF AGE 6<y 

at the tender age of ten months or so the boys did 
more kicking than the girls. Anyway, the shoes 
were more worn. But the colors! Red and 
lavender ; green and baby blue ! I just tossed them 
around to see how many colors were represented 
in the box. 

"There was a name on the sole of each shoe, 
put there many years ago, and I had a quiet game 
all to myself trying to pick out whose shoes they 
were just from looking at them. But I was wrong 
on the very first pair. They were about as long 
as my little finger, and wide at the top. All the 
buttons were off except the top button. 'Aha,' 
said I, 'that proves a fat leg, for the top button 
refused to meet over the bulging muscles and so 
this pair belongs to my older brother, John. He 
always was the biggest in the family.' Smiling 
at my deductions, I turned over the shoe and saw 
my own name. 

"Then in hunting for John's shoes, I made an- 
other bad guess and picked out Joe's. No one 
would have thought that feet which had worn 
such frail, fairy things as these, would ever tramp 
in trench mud and track the pathless ways of the 
Argonne Forest, ducking shells. So with Bill's 
and Ed's. Soldier feet in baby shoes! It was 
absurd! This pair marked — 'Charles, one year' 
gave me pause. Charles died when he was six- 
teen. A fine lad, just peeking in at the door of 
life. His feet are walking in Heaven's soft ways 
and need no shoes, not even baby shoes. 

"A quick glance showed me Maine's and 
Gertie's, but two pair remained unaccounted for. 
Perhaps they belonged to Aunt Mary's children. 
Or — but I lost patience after a moment and looked 



7 o THE HOME WORLD 

at the name. 'John, age one year.' John? There 
were two Johns in our family, Sr. and Jr. I 
knew my mother's handwriting and certainly this 
was not it. John! Why, these must be Pop's 
baby shoes. 

"Well, you know how it is. The tight feeling 
that comes round the heart. So I held the little 
shoes in my hand and gazed at them and then at 
the little red pair now all alone in the box. If 
this pair belonged to Pop, then most likely — Yes, 
there it was! 'Margaret, aged 8 months. 
Margaret! Ah, well, you will understand without 
my going any further. Margaret, you see, is my 
mother. And here in my hand, taken from the 
box where she kept her babies' shoes, I had found 
hers. Time ! Oh, Time ! There's many a laugh 
on your old, grim face, but keep the scythe away 
from Margaret and John!" 

That's why Dr. Holden likes old shoes. I 
thought a great deal of that learned man. Every- 
body in the parish did, but I wish the whole parish 
had been there to hear him tell of his affection for 
a pair of old shoes. It was not so much his 
words as the expression on his face. I caught 
this expresson several times when he forgot him- 
self, and I was reminded of the strong faces in 
the family album. We disagree in our preference 
for old things. I stick up for the tintypes, he for 
the old shoes, and still we both agree that old 
things teach good lessons. Dr. Holden is a 
learned man but he learns from old shoes^ that 
great learning, just like beauty or great riches, 
should not take away simplicity. 

A famous American writer moralizes on the 
insufficient "flavor of humanity in the soil out of 



THE BEAUTY OF AGE 71 

A- which we grow," and bids us consider the Old 
^, World. "The ploughman turns up an old Saxon's 
bones," he says, "and beneath them is a tessellated 
pavement of the time of the Caesars. . . . 
It makes a man human to live on these old human- 
ized soils. He cannot help marching in step with 
u his kind in the rear of such a procession. They 
say a dead man's hand cures swellings if laid on 
them. There is nothing like the dead cold hands 
of the Past to take down our tumid egotism and 
"lead us into the solemn flow of the life of our 
race." 1 

Old things have a fascination for their owners 
• that leads to extremes. Some men can never bring 
I themselves to get rid of certain out-of-date arti- 
1 cles. The carpet on the bedroom floor may be so 
worn that the pattern is traceable only in spots 
and that dimly, but the old Father wants the car- 
pet because it was there when he was a boy and 
to do such a modern thing as to take the carpet 
up, put down a hard-wood floor, shellac and wax 
it, and then cover it lightly with a small rug, this 
he would never permit. The carpet has been 
there so long that contemplation of it day in and 
day out for fifty years or so has completely hypno- 
tized him and you may as well let him alone with 
his old usages or there will be bickerings. 
,-■' Irving describes the man who indulges his ven- 
eration for family things to "a whimsical extent." 
Gangs of gypsies infest his manor-house and 
grounds, but simply because they are ancients in 
the family and have been pestering them for years 
out of mind, he will not suffer them to be dis- 
turbed. Century-old trees are never trimmed be- 
cause the birds' nests might be disturbed. Owls, 

holmes, The Professor at the Breakfast Table. 



72 



THE HOME WORLD 












because they are hereditary owls, are not molested, 
"Swallows have nearly choked up every chimney 
with their nests; martins build in every frieze and 
cornice ; crows flutter about the towers, and perch 
on every weathercock; and old gray-headed rats 
may be seen in every quarter of the house, running 
in and out of their holes undauntedly in broad 
daylight. In short," concludes Irving, "John has 
such a reverence for everything that has been long 
in the family, that he will not hear even of abuses 
being reformed, because they are good old family 
abuses." 

Now it might have been interesting to question 
Dr. Holden's mother about such homely things as 
these: First, the cradles. Where are they now? 
Upstairs in the unused room or still doing duty 
for the children of her children? Were there 
more than one for such a large family? Is there 
no way of looking at such a relic of the days when 
her babes were plump, ruddy, hungry and cooing 
things, sent down from heaven to her as the dew 
is sent to refresh the world? Now tell me, you 
mothers who are old, at least in years, tell me, 
where are the old cradles that were rocked so 
gently? What has become of all the wonderful 
thoughts you had when you gazed on the sleeping 
face of the child and looked into the future? Or 
perhaps you rocked the cradle with your foot and 
kept your hands busy with the needle and thread, 
mending for the boys and forever thinking, think- 
ing as you worked. The room was dim and the 
soft creaking of the cradle was restful; outside, if 
you lived on a small street of simple homes, you 
heard neighborly voices talking over domestic 
events ; or perhaps the letter-carrier rang the bell ; 



THE BEAUTY OF AGE 73 

or the raucous-voiced huckster shouted monoton- 
ously his — "Cabbages! Apples! Potatoes, To- 
matoes and Watermelons!" Or did you hear the 
ding-dong-bell of the scissors-grinder as he 
trundled his one-wheeled cart through the street ? 
Or perhaps the doctor's carriage drove up across 
the way where some one was sick. Whatever the 
sounds, they were all homey and the child slept 
peacefully through them all, rocked in the old 
cradle while you mended socks. Usually, didn't 
the clock chime at the end of the afternoon, when 
light was flickering and evening gathered its dark- 
ness, and the boys rushed in from school and out 
again on errands for milk and bread, grumbling 
all the while? You, dear old mothers, can re- 
member these things? Tell me then where is that 
cradle, for it belongs to the old things that fas- 
cinate by the marvellous associations connected 
with them. On its runners may still be seen the 
marks of your boys' feet as they, most unwillingly, 
but with great violence and speed, rocked the 
cradle while you prepared supper for the man of 
the house, now hurrying away from the shop and 
factory to his heaven in the side-street. The boy 
may have read a book of adventure while his feet 
worked vigorously, and sometimes perhaps, but 
let us hope, not often, the baby was catapulted 
into the air amid screams and cries from all, except 
the dumf ounded boy. Oh, then you scolded him ! 
Yes, even if he afterwards turned out to be a Dr. 
Holden, you scolded him and reached for the 
handy slipper! Do you remember these things 
in the days when the cradle was new and much 
occupied? Now where is it? Can it be that the 
cradle-romance has ended in a few strips of broken 



. 74 THE HOME WORLD 

wood and gone to light a fire? Rather let us 
suppose that the cradle is yet in the family, a 
reverenced object like the shoes and photos. 
We may ask other impertinent questions of these 



/ vve may asK otner impertinent questions or tnese 
old mothers? For instance, where are the high- 
chairs? The go-carts? The funny bits of frills 
called lace-caps that surrounded the boy's head 
and even then looked out of place on a man. 
Usually it was a pink cap and a blue coat, for the 
boy, or am I wrong? At any rate, I have never 
yet seen a male baby who looked comfortable in 
a lace-cap. Watch one pull at it and wrinkle its 
face in scorn of such feminine frippery! 

Now the high-chairs may still be in that interest- 
ing attic room and if you investigate the lid that 
used to come down over the child's head you 
will make some remarkable discoveries as to the 
characteristics of your children. The flap will be 
dented in many places. You know who did that? 
That was Bill who hammered his saucer and spoon 
at the same time and with both hands when he 
wanted more! The dents came naturally. Per- 
haps you will find the hinges of the flap very 
loose. That shows how Johnny used to lift the 
flap and bang it down again tirelessly just to hear 
the noise. What cared he how he imperilled his 
flesh-creased neck! Or whether Pop was napping 
upstairs? And that mended place in the chair is 
evidence of the day when the girl baby was inves- 
tigating the cat's actions in washing its face, and 
becoming absorbed, over she leaned, and still 
further over, till the chair went over too. Oh, 
the dreadful clamor! and you can show your 
daughter the mark that fall left. 

I confess to great and deplorable ignorance in 



THE BEAUTY OF AGE 75 

regard to those colored coats and shawls and 
things which used to be put round the baby, but 
they would tell a story of the past for you old 
mothers and would renew your youth for you 
and bring many sweet smiles to your faces. 
Every well-worn and well-torn garment belonged 
to the boys, that is certain; for somehow or other 
it seems the fate of the male in this life to be 
rough even when he is a baby. Evidence the 
poor lace-caps! And the fancy dresses that you 
made with such fond reflections on the arrival of 
this greatest baby! Shreds and tatters if ever 
they clothed the solid muscles of the boys ! 
/ So now let the old mothers who read this book 
on home, sit them down and think on the past 
and the relics of it in these cradles and shoes and 
high-chairs and lace-caps and baby-clothes. The 
meditation will be fruitful in prayers of thanks to 
God for His goodness. But your hearts will pain 
you. That past has gone long ago. You sit 
there now near the window and try to sew, but 
some one has to thread your needle. You hear 
the noises in the street, but the voices of your 
children are strangely silent. Everything around 
you is so quiet. Would to God that you could 
see your child's face again as it looked in the old 
days, so placid and peaceful and innocent in the 
cradle ! It's all gone and still you can thank God, 
for He has been good to any mother in giving 
her a little child, in making her home a Bethlehem 
and in putting into her life even one Christmas, 
when the boy or girl was born. 

You still have the pictures. Take out the one 
of yourself and your whiskered lover. Take out 
the one of yourself and the baby in your arms. 



76 THE HOME WofeLD 

Look at the one of the three children's heads and 
see how Ed kept his lips tightly pressed together 
simply because you told him to do so. See the 
photo of your daughter when she made her First 
Communion. Perhaps she is a holy nun and pre- 
paring other mothers' children for the same 
sacred rite. Look at the picture of your big boys 
and then kneel down quietly, and even though the 
house is strangely silent, even though no childish 
voices come to your ears, thank God for His 
goodness and ask Him to bless your boys and girls, 
and your man and yourself, and take you all into 
the great Home where old age is not known and 
we shall be forever young. 



CHAPTER VII 

SORROW AND DEATH IN THE HOME 

IT is true that if faith and hope are wanting, a 
mournful despair looms prominent in sorrow. 
The homes of men are subjected to these floods 
of grief and like swelling tempests the sorrows of 
life beat upon us. For the Catholic there ought 
to be nothing like despair. Catholic faith and 
hope are the bold, rooted rocks withstanding the 
buffets of the swelling storm. Faith and hope 
repulse the waves and grow more firmly rooted 
because attacked. 

The succession of joy and sorrow in our home- 
life welds hearts together, and that there will be 
joy followed by sorrow, we all know. The holy 
old man Simeon had been promised that he would 
not die before he had seen Christ. His joy must 
have been intense when at last he held in his arms 
the Infant and saw Mary, the Mother. But is 
it not evident that Simeon knew the end of his 
life was at hand? And did he not prophesy that 
a sword of sorrow would pierce the happy 
Mother's heart? Faith and hope were his, for he 
blessed God. Death was welcome. "Now thou 
dost dismiss Thy servant, O Lord, according to 
Thy word in peace: because my eyes have seen 
Thy salvation." 1 

The great overwhelming sorrow that visits the 

^uke u, 29. 

77 






7 8 THE HOME WORLD 

home is death. This grim guest comes uninvited 
and takes away some part of our hearts, yet even 
this King of Grief cannot harm Catholic faith and 
hope. Death is, after all, the port of rest and 
eternal safety. There, tranquillity reigns, the 
storms and tumults of earth rumble off into the 
far distance. They can harm our loved ones no 
more. 

Still, it is a fact, unnoticed but true, that when 
we wish our loved ones back on earth, we are 
wishing them back into the battle, back again 
among the struggling masses of men and women 
who are not fortunate enough to have been made 
welcome in the Home of Christ. "So also you 
now indeed have sorrow: but I will see you 
again," said Our Lord, "and your heart shall re- 
joice, and your joy no man shall take from you." 2 
Any desire or longing that would make us blush 
when Christ does see us again, should be erased 
from our souls. Hopeless sorrow over the be- 
loved dead is such a desire, since we want them 
for ourselves. The ones we love are seeing Him, 
their hearts are rejoicing as He promised, and 
their joy no man can take from them. Be con- 
tent. They have gone home. Let them rest in 
His arms. 

"Patience is as a case of armor around the 
heart, which deadens the blows inflicted on it; 
while impatience not only strips off that covering, 
but lays the very quick, in all its tenderness and 
delicacy of nerve, bare to the wounding knife." 3 

Yet we desire to remain on earth among these 
troubles. We are unwilling to give up the combat 
against the devil. Where is the pleasure in con- 
tinuing battle, a risky battle, where the enemy is 

s Jokn xvi. 22. 'Wiseman. 



SORROW AND DEATH 79 

so much better accoutred than we, so much more 
cunning. This is our inconsistency, to yearn for 
peace and rest, but at the same time to be unwill- 
ing to leave the earth. We should consider with 
St. Cyprian how unending is the strife. ^"Our 
contest is with avarice, with unchastity, with anger, 
with ambition. Against carnal vices and worldly 
allurements, we have an abiding and weary wrest- 
ling." So many, in fact, are the points of attack; 
such the wily enemy, that we are always near hope- 
lessness. "So soon as avarice has been laid low, 
lust rises; when lust is crushed, ambition follows; 
if ambition has been set at naught, anger embit- 
ters, pride inflates, drunkenness entices, envy de- 
stroys harmony and jealousy severs friendship."* 
Is it conceivable that when the breast is exposed 
to all these assaults of the Evil One, we are 
still unwilling to leave the battle for the glory 
of victory? Ought we not rather envy the dead? > 
Our Lord has told us: "Amen, amen, I say to 
you, that you shall lament and weep, but the world 
shall rejoice; and you shall be made sorrowful, 
but your sorrow shall be turned into joy." 5 

St. Paul urges this glory that will come 
after sorrow as a solace for trial. "We glory in 
tribulations, knowing that tribulation worketh 
patience, and patience trial, and trial hope.'" 5 

"For that which is at present momentary and 
light of our tribulation worketh for us above 
measure exceedingly, an eternal weight of glory." 1 

Can it be possible that you do not wish to be 
freed from sorrow? Are you disinclined to hurry 
toward happiness? "Your sorrow shall be turned 
into joy," Our Lord assures us, "and your joy 
no man shall take from you." "Do you still 

*lbid. *John xvi, 20. "Rom. v, 3, i. T II Cor. iv, 17. 



8o THE HOME WORLD 

waver? Are your eyes still fixed tensely on the 
world and its sorrows? "I will see you again," 
says Christ, "and your heart shall rejoice." 
"Since therefore," urges St. Cyprian, "to see 
Christ is to rejoice and our joy cannot be except 
when we see Christ, what blindness of mind, what 
madness is it, to love the troubles and pains and 
tears of the world and not rather hurry to that 
joy which can never be taken from us." 8 

Christ told the Apostles that He would soon 
depart, and they grew sad. "If you loved Me," 
said Our Lord, "you would indeed be glad because 
I go to the Father," thus teaching us that when 
our loved ones depart from this world, we ought 
not to waste idle tears over their new joy. They 
have gone to the Father. Life's chains are loosed 
forever; the prison doors are open and the soul 
we love is free. 

Tertullian, urging the martyrs rather to love 
than hate their prison, says: "For if we consider 
that the world itself is more a prison we shall 
perceive that you have gone forth rather from 
a prison than into one. The world has the 
greater darkness which binds the hearts of men. 
The world puts on the heavier bonds which bind 
the very souls of men. The world breathes forth 
the worse uncleanness, even the lusts of men. 
. . . It matters not where you are in the world, 
you who are doing without the world; and if you 
have lost any of the joys of life, it is a good 
business which loses something to gain more.'** 

Our beloved dead have exchanged the prison 
of this world for the home of heaven. Even in 
life it could be said of them as it ought to be 
said of us now, that while we may be confined in 

*On the Mortality. "To the Martyrs. 



SORROW AND DEATH 81 

the world, yet we are free as Christians to lift 
our souls ever higher and higher to God. Ter- 
tullian cries out to the martyrs: "Away with 
the name of prison! Though the body be shut 
up, though the flesh be confined, all is open to the 
spirit. Roam freely, thou spirit! Walk to and 
fro, thou spirit! Not setting before thee shady 
walks or long corridors, but that road which leads 
to God. As often as thou shalt walk here in the 
spirit, so often shalt thou not be in prison. The 
leg suffers nothing in the stocks while the mind 
is in heaven. The mind carries about with it the 
whole man and removes him withersoever it 
pleases. But where thy heart is, there will thy 
treasure be also. Let our heart then be where 
we would have our treasure." 10 

By mourning without bounds, we seem to betray 
our faith and hope; and while asserting that we 
believe our dear dead better oft where they have 
journeyed, we deny our statement by giving way 
to uncontrolled grief. We believe in God's word; 
we hope and live in the hope of the resurrection. 
We are certain that we shall rise again and see 
those we love and mourn. Have they been anni- 
hilated? Do we believe in Christ? "I am the 
resurrection and the life; he that believeth in Me, 
although he be dead, shall live ; and every one that 
liveth and believeth in Me, shall not die forever." 11 
We are confronted with the fact that eternal life 
cannot be enjoyed unless we die. Yes, we must 
die to see Christ. "Father, I will that where I 
am, they also whom Thou hast given Me may 
be with Me; that they may see My glory which 
Thou hast given Me because Thou hast loved Me 
before the creation of the world." 12 Who is 

"On Matt, vi, 21. ^Tohn xi, 35. "Ibid, xvii, 24. 



82 THE HOME WORLD 

there so pleased with life and the world as to be 
willing to remain alive at the cost of eternal 
happiness? _ 

"We are going from the moment of our birth,' 
cries out St. Augustine. 13 "For what man is sta- 
tionary? Who is not forced to be in progress 
from the time of his entering on the path of life? 
A child is born; he walks by his growth; death 
is the term. We must attain that end but in 
gladness. Who is there who does not weep here 
in this evil way when the very infant begins by 
tears? The infant indeed, when it is born, iscast 
into this immense world from the small prison- 
house of its mother's womb, and proceeds from 
darkness into light, and for all that it comes out 
of the darkness into light it can weep, but it can- 
not laugh. Men both laugh and weep and their 
laughter is matter for weeping. One man grieves 
over a loss, another at his straitened circum- 
stances, another because he is imprisoned, another 
because death has deprived him of one of his best 
beloved ones, and so it is with each. . . ^ . 
The tears of the just are plentiful, but only in 
this world." 

So it is that St. Paul urges: "We will not have 
you ignorant, brethren, concerning them that are 
asleep, that you be not sorrowful even as others 
who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus 
died and rose again, even so them who have slept 
through Jesus, will God bring with Him." 14 

One often hears the complaint : "I have always 
tried to do my best for God, and He has taken 
away my only child. Why does God afflict those 
who are serving Him? The bad suffer not half so 
much as the good." 

^Sermon xxxi. "I Thess. iv 12. 



SORROW AND DEATH 83 

This is an age-old complaint and touches the 
deep problem ot the existence of evil in the world. 
Faith is required to understand the solution. 
Death and sorrow lay their clammy hands on the 
good as well as the bad, and our complaint, that 
we who are good ought not to suffer in the same 
way as the bad, presupposes that the good ought to 
enjoy worldly happiness, untouched by evil. s We 
should be allowed to revel gaily in present joys 
and look ahead with delight on the heaven re- 
served for us. We really mean that the bad 
should have all the suffering and the good all the 
pleasures. 

Now a good man's joy ought to be spiritual. 
His soul should be glad. No evil man is ever 
happy in soul, though his face may be wreathed 
in smiles. But no matter how heavy the load of 
sorrow placed on the good man's shoulders, his 
soul is happy simply because he is good. This 
is the difference which we forget. We attend to 
externals only. We see the wreathing smiles only. 
The good man's frowns do not betoken unhappi- 
ness. 

Here is a significant reflection on the matter of 
carrying the crosses God gives us. "Taking up 
one's cross means simply that you are to go the 
road which you see to be the straight one ; carry- 
ing whatever you find is given you to carry, as well 
and stoutly as you can; without making faces, or 
calling people to come and look at you. Above 
all, you are neither to load nor unload yourself; 
nor cut your cross to your own liking. Some 
people think it would be better for them to have 
it large; and many that they could carry it much 
faster if it were small; and even those who like 






8 4 THE HOxME WORLD 

it largest are usually very particular about its be- 
ing ornamental, and made of the best ebony. But 
all that you have really to do is to keep your 
back as straight as you can; and not think about 
what is upon it — above all, not to boast of what 
is upon it." 15 

Human sorrows are common to all mankind, 
good and bad alike. Blindness, paralysis, deaf- 
ness, lunacy, and all evils without exception, are 
common inheritances from Adam. Disease and 
death grew out of the apple, out of the pride of 
our parent Adam. "Wherefore, until this cor- 
ruptible put on incorruption, and this mortal put 
on immortality," 16 and the Spirit guide us to God 
the Father, whatsoever are the troubles of the 
flesh, are the common portion of mankind. When 
therefore the earth pines in an unfruitful barren- 
ness, famine makes no difference one way or the 
other; when any city is occupied by a hostile as- 
sault, the capture lays its desolation equally upon 
all. And when the becalmed atmosphere suspends 
the rain, there is equal drought to all, and when 
the jutting rocks dash the vessel to pieces, the 
voyagers, without exception, suffer shipwreck." 17 
But the good Christian must prepare himself for 
still greater sufferings than the wicked are forced 
to endure. "For gold and silver are tried in the 
fire, but acceptable men in the furnace of humilia- 
tion." 18 

Job lost his riches and his children; endured 
horrible sufferings of body and mind, and strongly 
persisted in his allegiance to God. "Then Job 
rose up, and rent his garments, and having shaven 
his head, fell down upon the ground and wor- 
shipped, and said: Naked came I out of my 

^Ruskin, Ethics of the Dust. 10 I Cor. xv, 53. 17 St. Cyprian, ibid. 
™Ecclus. ii, 5. 



SORROW AND DEATH 85 

mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither. 
The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away. 
As it hath pleased the Lord, so is it done. Blessed 
be the Name of the Lord." 19 

And when Job's wife urged him to curse God 
and die, he answered her: "Thou hast spoken 
like one of the foolish women. If we have re- 
ceived good things at the hand of God, why 
should we not receive evil?" 20 

The good man Tobias, had served God by 
many works of mercy, and was then afflicted with 
blindness. Still, continuing to bless God in the 
days of evil as he had done in prosperous times, 
Tobias was impatient with the complaints of his 
relations: "Where is thy hope, for which thou 
gavest alms, and buriedst the dead?" But Tobias 
rebuked them saying: "Speak not so: for we are 
the children of saints, and look for that life which 
God will give to those that never change their 
faith from Him." 21 

What is the approval which God stamps upon 
a man like Tobias? How does God regard the 
patient suffering of evils? He sends His Angel 
to comfort and heal. "When thou didst pray with 
tears," said Raphael to Tobias, "and didst bury the 
dead, and didst leave thy dinner and hide the dead 
by day in thy house, and bury them by night, I 
offered thy prayer to the Lord. And because thou 
wast acceptable to God, it was necessary that 
temptation should prove thee. And now the Lord 
hath sent me to heal thee, and to deliver Sara 
thy son's wife from the devil. For I am the 
Angel Raphael, one of the seven who stand before 
the Lord." 22 

To be patient in adversity is a Christian virtue. 

"Job i, 20, 21. "Ibid, ii, 10. n Tob. ii, 16-18. »lbid, xii, 12. 


















86 



THE HOME WORLD 



The Jews did not grasp its meaning for they were 
ever murmuring against God. You sometimes 
look for a great thing you can give God. Listen 
to the Psalm: "A sacrifice to God is an afflicted 
spirit; a contrite and humble heart, O God, Thou 
wilt not despise." 23 

Give this broken spirit to God; offer your tears 
for the dead; your bitter disappointments for the 
living; your blasted hopes and your life of failure. 
Offer this and He will send an Angel Raphael to 
receive your sacrifice and bear it to Him where He 
sits governing all things well. We are not failures 
when God afflicts us. The contrary is true, for 
because we are acceptable to God, therefore 
does He send us sufferings. No man is a 
failure who is successful in the sight of God. 
"For the Lord your God trieth you, that it 
may appear whether you love Him with all 
your heart, and with all your soul, or not." 24 
Think of the test to which God put Abraham, 
when He demanded the sacrifice of his only 
son. You murmur and weep and are inconsol- 
able when the common law of disease and 
death has claimed your son. What would you 
do if you were told by God to take your son 
and slay him? 

St. Paul says that he is made a better man by the 
uses of adversity because by enduring evil things 
he is more and more proved. "And lest the great- 
ness of the revelations should exalt me, there was 
given me a sting of my flesh, an angel of Satan, to 
buffet me. For which thing thrice I besought the 
Lord, that it might depart from me. And He said 
to me : My grace is sufficient for thee; for power 
is made perfect in infirmity. Gladly therefore will 

"Ps. 1. ™Deut. xiii, 3. 



SORROW AND DEATH 87 

I glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ 
may dwell in me." 25 

Where is the skill of the pilot needed most and 
most revealed if not in the storm that threatens 
thousands of lives? Is not the bravery of the 
soldier shown in the heat of battle? The airplane 
must risk the ascent before it can fly over cities, 
and those are weak trees which have not resisted 
the howling storm. No birds should build in 
trees that have been thus unmoved, for when the 
storm does come, the nest will be ruined with the 
tree. Those who do not know God cannot under- 
stand suffering and sorrow. Their lives are filled 
with murmurings, and only the desolate riches of 
complaints are stored away for them, while true 
Christians are made strong amid suffering. Our 
merit, let us pray, is heaped high because we have 
shed tears and known grief. 

After all, today's sorrows are little things. 
They will pass away quickly like all things of 
earth. They are only the reflections of the sad 
yesterdays, for the human race is the same in all 
ages, and while it keeps stumbling and walking 
haltingly toward God and Judgment, to-day's grief 
is but a mirror of sorrows centuries old. 

The plague that forced the following words 
from St. Cyprian would seem to be like the Spanish 
Influenza of our day. Certainly if you were not 
told who was speaking and in what age he lived, 
you would easily believe that some sage of to-day 
was voicing his regrets and uttering his advice on 
the modern pestilence. In the middle of the third 
century a plague of particular violence spread 
among the people and lasted for twelve dreadful 
years. "This present visitation," says St. Cyprian, 

stfl Cor. xii, 7-9. 



88 THE HOME WORLD 

"of the strength of the body drained by an inward 
flux; of fire in the marrow breaking out in wounds 
upon the jaws; of the entrails shaken by continual 
vomiting; the eyes made bloodshot by fever; the 
feet of some, or other parts of the body removed 
through excess of putrid disease; while from the 
debility occasioned by this maiming and waste of 
the body, either motion is impeded, or hearing 
obstructed, or sight lost — all this, is a profitable 
instance of faith. What greatness is it of spirit 
to battle in strength of soul unshaken, against 
these assaults of desolation and death! How 
glorious to stand unbending among the ruins of 
the human race instead of lying prostrate with 
those who have no hope in God." 26 

Rather does he urge us to turn the mind to the 
benefits of death. "Behold virgins depart peace- 
ably and securely in their full honors, unafraid of 
the threats and corruptions and polluted places 
of the coming Anti-Christ. Boys, escaped the 
peril of their unsafe years, happily arrive at the 
reward of continence and innocence. The delicate 
matron is no longer in dread of torture, by an 
early death winning ransom from fear of persecu- 
tion and the tormenting hands of the slaughterer. 
By the terrors of death in these days, lukewarm 
men are heartened; the listless nerved; the slug- 
gish awakened; deserters from the faith compelled 
to return; heathens brought to believe; the con- 
gregations of established believers brought to rest; 
fresh and numerous champions are banded in 
heartier strength for the conflict, and having come 
into warfare in the season of death, they will fight 
without fear of death when the battle comes." 27 

The fear of death and the pain of suffering 

x On the Mortality. *Ibid. 



SORROW AND DEATH 89 

will always be with us. But shut out the fear 
of death! Look beyond the sable doors and see 
the life we were born to enjoy! Why fool with 
the bauble, the toy of a moment, when the simple 
passing from one room of life into another room 
of heaven; from the dark room to the room bril- 
liant with the light that floods from the Face of 
God, will give us the reality of joy, the payment 
of suffering, God for eternity ! 

The days of suffering are days in the mint when 
we coin gold that will buy Heaven. There is 
nothing in the world that should make us stay. 
We are strangers. We are journeying. Heaven 
is the resting place. The journey is across the 
world and the battle against ambushing enemies is 
continual and long. Heaven is the enjoyment of 
victory. No matter how far we wander up and 
down the roads of the world, there is ever the 
thought of home and our return. We bless the 
prospering winds that speed our ship to the native 
shore. We bless the smooth level road over 
which our journey lies, with the lights of home 
ahead. The ones we loved are waiting our em- 
brace. See, they are all smiles and tears at our 
return. What! Did we imagine they were to 
be mourned when we were the wanderers ! They 
prayed God anxiously for us and our safe return 
and we were wishing them back on the road, back 
on the restless ocean with us ! Strange perversity 
of truth! Heaven is our home, our native land; 
a goodly company awaits us, parents, father and 
mother, our children, wives, brothers and sisters, 
friends and relations. The great and good of all 
times and all countries are there on the threshold. 
They are secure, at peace, at home. Hurry to 



9 o THE HOME WORLD 

them! Embrace them! You were the lost one; 
you had strayed. Now you too are back home, in 
the arms you longed for, with lips pressed to 
yours in a love that is deathless, in a home where 
are no more terrors and where life itself can 
never end. Oh, may God receive us all at the 
gate of His great Home ! 



H i 



CHAPTER VIII 
THE DEATH OF THE YOUNG 

THE prophet Jeremias mourning over the ruin 
wrought by the Chaldaeans on the people 
of Jerusalem, speaks thus: "Hear therefore, ye 
women, the word of the Lord, and let your ears 
receive the word of His mouth; and teach your 
daughters wailing, and every one her neighbor 
mourning. For death is come up through our 
windows; it is entered into our houses, to destroy 
the children from without, the young men from 
the streets. Speak: Thus saith the Lord: Even 
the carcass of man shall fall as dung upon the face 
of the country, and as grass behind the back of the 
mower, and there is none to gather it. Thus saith 
the Lord: Let not the wise man glory in his 
wisdom, and let not the strong man glory in his 
strength, and let not the rich man glory in his 
riches; but let him that glorieth glory in this, 
that he understandeth and knowe^h Me, for I am 
the Lord that exercise mercy and judgment and 
justice in the earth; for these things please Me, 
saith the Lord." 1 
/ The mother who has suddenly felt her babe's 
' body grow cold ; who has seen the bright eyes dim 
and fix into a glassy stare ; who has felt the con- 
vulsive straightening of the little form, and on a 
sudden, realized that the child for whom she went 

Uer. ix, 20-24. 

91 



92 THE HOME WORLD 

down into the valley of the shadow of death, is 
now dead — she will know how hard it is to see 
the young die. Death has chilled all her joy and 
laid it, a pitifully small mould, in the senseless arms 
of the earth. 

Our home-world must experience the death of 
the young. Just as in the larger world we see the 
white hearse gliding silently by on its sad errand 
of bringing dust to dust, so in our smaller world 
we may, some day, be forced to watch the youth- 
ful spirit struggle out from the trappings of 
the flesh, and be forced to hang a white crepe 
on the door. 

If the dread time comes to you, do not despair. 
Think that some fruits ripen earlier than others, 
and fall to the ground, not because they are dis- 
carded and worthless, but because they are 
matured in the light and sun, beneath the airs of 
a smiling sky, and are being gathered home early. 

So with your little child. In a short space, the 
tot matured, was exempted from the toils of earth, , 
and called to the perpetual playground of Heaven. 

We loved our children for their beauty of 
countenance and form and their warm throbbing 
life. Because they were so lovable they were fit 
for Heaven, the land of love. The great Father 
looked over His beautiful garden of the world, 
and seeing the glowing rose, the perfect lily, the 
humble blue violet, and the modest wood-flowers; 
seeing all the glorious growth due to His careful 
gardening, He plucked some flowers here and 
there for Himself. Why, then! We should re- 
joice at the lot of these flowers ! They were not 
for our sight. How could they be when they 
pleased the eyes of the all-pure God? Their 



THE DEATH OF THE YOUNG 93 

beauty is undying, their fragance will be forever 
sweet, for they delighted God. 

Now you can imagine the fairest of maidens, 
Our Blessed Mother, presenting one of these buds 
from her Father's garden, to the world's first 
gentleman, her Son. You can see Him smiling 
at the gift of the little flower culled from among 
the weeds of the world, for this blossom has been 
watered, and beautified in the red dews that fell 
one Friday from His grim Cross. 

Very often, little childen are the thank-gifts we 
pay Christ for His death; and very often, we 
solace Mary for the sword that pierced her heart, 
by placing our infant on her bosom. 

Why, then, be sad? Weep awhile; envy the 
children, but leave them with Christ and Mary and 
the great Father. 

The Church considers such children old. Take, 
for example, the life story and death of St. 
Stanislaus Kostka. The Church chooses for the 
prayers of the Mass reflections on old age and the 
death of the young, and she finally draws the 
conclusion that old age is not a matter of years 
nor of gray hairs, but that it consists in a spotless 
life. 

"For venerable old age is not that of long time; 
nor is it measured by the number of years; but 
. . . a spotless life is old age." 

Stanislaus died when he was only eighteen years 
old, a mere boy, just tasting life, just touching 
his lips to the brimming cup and feeling the warm 
blood of manhood in his veins. He was awak- 
ening to the possibilities of the future. And 
when he marched firmly out on the road of life, 
he met death in the highway waiting for him. The 



94 THE HOME WORLD 

monster wrapped him in its black mantle and car- 
ried him off from all youthful hopes and warm 
life. Yet the Church calls him an old man, not 
in so many words, it is true, but by an evident 
implication; for though St. Stanislaus did not enjoy 
long years of life, though he did not live to have 
gray hairs and the venerable aspect of the aged, 
he did have a spotless life when Death met him, 
and a spotless life is old age. 

And here we may make a mistake in trying to 
find out what the Scripture means by a spotless 
life. Certainly the life of St. Stanislaus was not 
an easy, comfortable life, ignorant of trouble and 
cares. Though a boy he knew what it was to 
suffer. His brother Paul persecuted him while 
they were at school together; his father refused 
time and again to hear of his being a Jesuit; he 
was forced to live with heretics, bitter enemies of 
the Church and her holy practices. Perhaps his 
mother alone knew that the sensitive, tender boy 
was something beyond the common, for every time 
she looked into his eyes, she could recall the mar- 
vellous occurrences at his birth. The sufferings of 
his school life pained him, but the love of his 
mother and the fact that she understood him 
balanced the pain. 

Once while at school he lay sick of a fever. He 
pleaded with his brother Paul to get him the 
priest for Confession and the last Sacraments. 
But Paul and the heretics, in whose house the two 
boys were lodging, refused his request and laughed 
at him. Then the devil appeared and tempted 
the holy youth, but in the midst of his trial God 
did not forsake him and sent His Angel to give 
Stanislaus Holy Communion. On another occa- 



THE DEATH OF THE YOUNG 95 

sion the Mother of God rewarded his devotion by 
placing in his arms the Infant Jesus and bade him 
enter the Society of Jesus. In obeying her, St. 
Stanislaus gives an example of promptness mixed 
with an endurance that is singular. For he set 
out for Rome on foot and walked 1,200 miles to 
the novitiate. Such a marvellous accomplishment 
proves the heart of the young man, and the indi- 
cation it gives of obedience at all costs, is singu- 
larly proper in one who was entering the Order 
of Ignatius the soldier, an Order that exacts more 
than military obedience from the black-robed regi- 
ments massed in its lines. 

St. Stanislaus lived only two years in the Society 
and when he died frequent miracles proved his 
wonderful sanctity. He is the patron of all Jesuit 
novitiates. He is one of the great patrons of 
Poland, his native land, and every Jesuit in all 
the world is proud to call the young boy Saint 
his brother. 

This is his whole life. It may be summed up 
in a sentence ; he was an innocent boy persecuted 
by his family and strangers, but God strengthened 
him and as he lived only for God, as he loved God 
alone above all things, so when he died he went 
to God's happiness in Heaven with a pure soul 
and a few short years of life to account for. 

Knowing these details of his life it may not 
seem so strange that the Church reflects on old 
age and the death of the young in celebrating his 
feast day. For of what use is it to live long years 
if we live them in sin, detested by God, unloved by 
our fellow men and hated by ourselves? Such 
years are burdens, for no man can escape from 
himself, and every one who sins must ever have 



9 6 THE HOME WORLD 

those sins before his eyes all his life long, and sin 
is a miserable companion. Life with such a ghost 
haunting us is terrible. 

We have seen the old die and we have said: 
"Well, he lived to a good old age; he lived the 
three score years and ten." 

We have seen the young die and we have said : 
"What a pity! So young! Just in the bud of life 
and — dead!" 

But have we ever looked at it in this way? 
"That old man lived a spotless life, and he was 
old not by reason of his years but by reason of 
his spotlessness. That young man lived only a 
few years, yet he lived to a grand old age, for a 
spotless life is old age." 

There was a picture shown time time ago of 
a graveyard in France where American soldiers 
are buried. It was amazing to read that in one 
graveyard there were buried twenty-eight thou- 
sand of these young soldiers. We remember the 
men who made up our regiments, young, strong, 
cheerful, lithe, active fellows, eager for the danger, 
eager to do their duty for the land they loved. 
Think! Twenty-eight thousand of these young 
men are buried in one graveyard. The average 
cannot be more than twenty-two. 

Why is it that we pity them? Why is it that we 
weep for them. They died young, they died 
swiftly, their life was cut short by the ping of a 
bullet, by an exploding shell, by the sudden savage 
thrust of a bayonet — and we pity them, we weep 
for them because there is in every human heart 
the desire to live, to live for many, many years, to 
a good old age, to live until the winter of snowy 
old years is on us, white and cold, but warm in the 



THE DEATH OF THE YOUNG 97 

veneration of our fellows. This is where we 
make our mistake, for the Church warns us, on the 
feast of St. Stanislaus and after his example, that 
years do not make up old age, nor do gray hairs, 
but a spotless life, and if those soldiers sleeping in 
the fields of France, buried in a foreign land far 
from all they held dear on earth; if those soldiers 
were spotless in God's sight when the bullet struck 
them, when the long steel bayonet pierced them, 
yes, even if they had wiped their souls clean at 
the very last moment, then they have lived to a 
grand old age, and their name is in honor and 
benediction forever. 

In the last years the influenza has come among 
us with Death on its arm, and just as we have seen 
a man cut down grass or wheat with a scythe, so 
the pestilence went among us and Death was 
swinging the scythe. Now the young were cut 
down but it was noticed that the very young and 
the very old seemed to escape, yet youth in its 
beauty and strength and power was sought out 
by the sharp edge of the scythe in the skeleton 
hand and ruthlessly cut down. 

There is the case of a young girl who was to 
be married on a certain day in January. She and 
her mother and her sisters had spent many happy 
hours together preparing the dresses, buying the 
things she would need for the little nest she was 
building for herself and the young man who loved 
her with all the affection of a manly heart. He 
had just returned from France with a medal for 
courage shining on his breast, and before this 
young couple there seemed to stretch ahead the 
road to a great happiness even unto a good old 
age. A week before the day set acide for the 



98 THE HOME WORLD 

marriage, the girl took sick with the influenza 
and on the day she was to be married — she died. 

There is the case of a young man who had 
finished his law studies and was making a name 
for himself. He was a brilliant man, gifted with 
every talent. He was a powerful man hardly ever 
sick in his life. When he married he was already 
a well known lawyer and a wonderful career was 
predicted for him. A son was born to him and 
when the boy was one month old, the father came 
home one day with a cold. His wife urged him 
to go to bed, but he refused. The next day he 
had a fever. The doctor was called, examined 
him and shook his head. Influenza and pneu- 
monia, both well advanced. In a week the young 
lawyer was dead and his wife left alone with the 
child, was sick not with the influenza nor with any- 
thing the doctors could cure, but sick with the 
crushing sickness of the heart. She left the house, 
she could not bear to go into those rooms where 
her husband had been when Death gripped him 
by the shoulder and led him away from his new 
home, away from his happiness, away from his 
young wife, away from his young son. 

Some years ago a band of seminarians went on 
a picnic to a place along a nearby river. It was 
a hot day in August and the picnic promised to be 
a most happy one, a day in the open, a day far 
from the books, a day glorious in the expansive- 
ness of the great outdoors and in the jolly com- 
panionship of good companions. One of the 
students, a hearty, cheerful, holy and talented 
man, very popular with all his comrades, went in 
swimming with the rest, and in less than two 
minutes, a friend who was swimming along near 



THE DEATH OF THE YOUNG 99 

him, heard a gasp, a faint choking cry and — that 
was all. He went down. Now there were expert 
swimmers in the gathering, they rushed to the 
spot and dived for the body. The suspense was 
terrible, for moment after moment passed and 
though they knew the exact spot at which he 
had gone down, yet in the Providence of God, they 
were unable with all their toil and superhuman 
efforts to recover the body. They labored for 
five awful hours and when at last they drew the 
body in from the fatal waters, it was a sad 
sight to see the lifeless shell of what had been so 
short a time ago their friend; it was a sad sight to 
see how the strong arms dangled listlessly when 
they moved his body; sad to see how the noble 
head wagged powerlessly when the mourning 
friends carried him to the shore. 

His mother was seventy-five years old and a 
certain seminarian saw her when she . was just 
about to step into the college parlor to look on 
the body of her son for the first time. She came 
to the threshold and looked fearingly in. She 
saw in the dim light the students grouped around, 
praying; she saw the black hangings on the win- 
dows; she saw the lighted candles, and at last — 
at last — she saw the black coffin, and fell on her 
knees and cried out mournfully: "O Mother of 
Sorrows, give me the strength to bear it!" 

Yet it seems strange to us that the Church in 
celebrating the feast of St. Stanislaus should re- 
flect on old age and the death of the young. We 
need such reflections! Ask your own heart. 
There is a mother who has mourned for a young 
boy for years and years. Oh, what a fine strong 
man he would be today! There is a father who 



ioo THE HOME WORLD 

has wept silently over the little girl who went away 
from him many years ago and will not come back 
again. How bright his home would be, if she 
were there! Think of those whom you knew. 
They died young and you pitied them just as you 
pity St. Stanislaus when you hear that he died at 
the early age of eighteen. We are foolish to pity 
them, for in the very first prayer of the Mass 
in honor of Stanislaus, it says, speaking of the 
Saint and of all young men who have died in God's 
holy grace: "Because he was pleasing in God's 
sight, therefore, God snatched him away from the 
midst of wickedness. A spotless life is old age.'* 

And who can say that God does not know best? 
Old age might have meant eternal damnation in 
hell-fire, if your boy or girl had lived. Who can 
say that the graveyard in France where 28,000 
young soldiers are sleeping is not the resting-place 
of many Saints! 

The merit of the supreme sacrifice made by the 
young troops is increased when we think that they 
died in a foreign land. God considered such a 
death a serious sorrow, for He threatened the 
King of Juda with it as a grave penalty. "Weep 
not for him that is dead, nor bemoan him with 
your tears; lament him that goeth away, for he 
shall return no more, nor see his native country." 2 
And again, later on, we find this threat: "And 
I will send thee and thy mother that bore thee, 
into a strange country, in which you were not 
born; and there you shall die." 3 

Surely it is comforting to look forward to a day 
when, if we must die, our eyes will be closed not 
by the hands of strangers, but by the hands that 
have worked deeds of love for us. Dying itself 

Uer. xxii, 10. 3 Ibid., 26. 



THE DEATH OF THE YOUNG 101 

is a lonesome business in any case, but to die 
among strangers is appalling. 

Who can say that the young girl who died on 
her marriage-day is not better off than if she had 
lived to be a hundred? Who will dare to say that 
the young lawyer was not better off when he died in 
his youth after receiving all the Sacraments? The 
mother of the seminarian who was drowned put 
the case clearly when she said, in the midst of her 
bitter tears: "If he had lived he might have 
sinned." 

Still, after all our reflections, is it not strange 
to think that more young people die before reach- 
ing mature life than those who are granted the 
blessing of years and gray hairs? It would seem 
that the human race puts forth its buds and is 
never allowed to see them in their beauty. It is 
like the gardener who cultivates his flowers only 
to find in the end that more have drooped and 
died in immaturity than those which have matured 
and reached their full time of life. 

This is seen also in the Gospels, for those whom 
Our Lord raised from the dead, we find all to 
have been young. Lazarus was about thirty; the 
son of the widow of Nairn was young; the 
daughter of the ruler was young. 

How many of one family ever reach the age of 
seventy? How many of your own family have 
you buried before the hoar-frost touched their 
hairs and the mellow wisdom of age brightened 
on their lips and in their eyes? 

It is the same with the apple-trees and the 
cherry-trees. In spring what a magnificent mass 
of sweet-scented blossoms, enriching the air with 
their fragrance. Then a few rain storms and 



ioz THE HOME WORLD 

many of the tender flowers are lying on the 
ground, in the mud. A few wind storms and a 
heap of fragile beauty lies clustered about the 
dark melancholy roots of the mother tree as if she 
grieved for her children, gone so soon. And if 
the flowers escape the rains and the winds, how 
very often it happens that the frost bites their 
beauty and nips their hold on the parent branch 
whence they draw their nourishment and strength, 
and sends them fluttering down to the frozen 
earth. 

Now what is the reason for this? Surely, God 
who lets not the sparrow fall unheeded to the 
earth, must have His own good design in permit- 
ting death to mow down the young of our race 
and leave them in countless rows for the resurrec- 
tion. 

There are many reasons which can be assigned. 
The Scriptures tell us, for instance, of the death 
of David's child, because the King had sinned. 
The story is well worth repeating. It contains 
many good lessons for us when we shall be in 
grief for the loss of our children. "And David 
said to Nathan: I have sinned against the Lord. 
And Nathan said to David: The Lord also hath 
taken away thy sin. Thou shalt not die. Never- 
theless, because thou hast given occasion to the 
enemies of the Lord to blaspheme, for this thing, 
the child that is born to thee, shall surely die. 
And Nathan returned to his house. The Lord 
also struck the child which the wife of Urias had 
borne to David, and his life was despaired of. 
And David besought the Lord for the child; and 
David kept a fast, and going in by himself lay 
upon the ground. . . . And it came to pass 



THE DEATH OF THE YOUNG 103 

on the seventh day that the child died. And the 
servants of David feared to tell him that the 
child was dead. For they said: Behold when 
the child was yet alive, we spoke to him and he 
would not hearken to our voice. How much more 
will he afflict himself if we tell him that the child 
is dead? But when David saw his servants 
whispering, he understood that the child was 
dead. And he said to his servants : Is the child 
dead? They answered him: He is dead." 

Now we read that David arose and anointed 
himself and ate meat, and his servants were sur- 
prised, for when the child was sick, David had 
wept and prayed and fasted, and now that the 
child was dead, the King rose and ate. David 
answered the servants, and his answer should be 
written heavily on all sorrowing hearts. "While 
the child was yet alive, I fasted and wept for him; 
for I said: Who knoweth whether the Lord 
may not give him to me, and the child may live. 
But now that he is dead, why should I fast? Shall 
I be able to bring him back any more? I shall 
go to him rather; but he shall not return to me." 4 

And this is done according to the just judg- 
ment of God. He said: "For I am the Lord 
thy God, a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of 
the fathers upon their children unto the third 
and fourth generation to them that hate Me, and 
showing mercy unto many thousands to them that 
love Me, and keep My commandments." 5 

Hence, one reason for the death of the young 
is the punishment of the parents. "Oh," you say, 
"I would rather die myself than see my child die !" 
David would have died to save the innocent son, 
the result of his sin. But it is a greater punish- 

*II Kings xii, 13-31. *Deut. v, 9, 10. 



io 4 THE HOME WORLD 

ment to take your child away from you than to 
take away your life, is it not? Hence the aveng- 
ing hand of God is heavy on you if you sin against 
Him. The children are well taken care of, and 
David's child has been enjoying happiness these 
thousands of years. God punishes the parents, 
not the children, when he takes the child to Him- 
self and leaves emptiness in hearts that have 
turned away from Him. 

Another reason for the death of the young is 
the sins of the young themselves. 

Absalom, David's handsome son, rebelled 
against his father, gave great scandal to the 
nation, and was punished by death when God made 
his beauty the means of his hanging. How David 
wept for his boy, Absalom! But David knew 
that God was just in taking him away, for the boy 
had sinned and been the source of sin in others. 
He had caused the murder of his brother Amnon 
and caused his father to flee. He was given over 
to pleasure and vengeance and ambition and we 
read: "But in all Israel there was not a man so 
comely, and so exceeding beautiful as Absalom; 
from the sole of his foot to the crown of his 
head there was no blemish in him," yet all this 
beauty and forgiveness of his father, came to a 
sad ending, for while Absalom hung by his hair 
from the bough of the oak tree, Joab, the King's 
general, thrust three lances through his heart 
"and whilst he yet panted for life, sticking on the 
oak, ten young men, armor-bearers of Joab, ran 
up and, striking him, slew him. . . . and they 
took Absalom and cast him into a great pit in the 
forest, and they laid an exceeding great heap of 
stones upon him." 



THE DEATH OF THE YOUNG 105 

Now the King loved his son, and when report 
of the battle was brought to him, his question was 
this: "Is the young man Absalom safe? And 
Chusai answering him said: Let the enemies of 
my lord, the King, and all that rise against him 
unto evil, be as the young man is. The King 
therefore being much moved, went up to the high- 
chamber over the gate, and wept. And as he went 
he spoke in this manner: My son Absalom, 
Absalom, my sonl Would to God that I might 
die for thee, Absalom, my son, my son Absa- 
lom!" 6 

Apply this affecting account of David and his 
son to the many life-stories that are being written 
in our modern days by young men who run into 
evil against the advice and fond love of their 
parents and friends. God punishes them by 
early deaths, and though, like David, we weep 
and moan for their loss, still God in His heaven 
knows whether they had their chance and threw 
it away. 

These two reasons for the death of the young 
are terrible to contemplate. But what of the good 
parents and the good sons? They die, too. 
Neither sin to any great extent, and yet they are 
swept up into the dust-heap of the dead with 
those who have sinned and incurred the wrath of 
God. 

The answer is joyous and consoling. If the 
reasons given above make us shrink, and, let us 
hope, avoid sin, the reason to be given now should 
make us rejoice, for now God is not angry in His 
Judgeship but loving in His Fatherhood. It is the 
same answer that we make to the question : Why 
did a holy youth like St. Stanislaus die at the 

°II Kings xviii. 



io6 THE HOME WORLD 

early age of eighteen years? This is the answer 
given by Scripture : 

"He pleased God and was beloved, and living 
among sinners he was translated. He was taken 
away lest wickedness should alter his understand- 
ing, or deceit beguile his soul. For the bewitching 
of vanity obscureth good things, and the wander- 
ing of concupiscence overturneth the innocent 
mind. Being made perfect in a short space, he 
fulfilled a long time; for his soul pleased God; 
therefore He hastened to bring him out of the 
midst of iniquities. But the people see this and 
understand not, nor lay up such things in their 
hearts; that the grace of God and His mercy 
is with His saints, and that He has respect to His 
chosen." 7 

We must admit that the traps of Satan are al- 
ways yawning for the young. Their feet walk 
swiftly into snares, and the beauty of life fas- 
cinates them. This is the bait the devil uses to 
catch them and once this "witchery and non- 
sense" has seized hold on their souls, it is most 
difficult to remove it. God takes them to Him- 
self and saves their unwary feet from slipping, 
their thoughtless steps from stumbling. Surely, 
for the young, the cup of death has many nauseat- 
ing dregs in it, and for us who must stand help- 
lessly by and see them slip out of the envelope of 
the flesh, for us it is bitter, too. But we cannot 
think for a moment that death, such as was St. 
Stanislaus', is in reality a bitter thing. We all 
must slip through the tunnel, dark, with walls 
dripping, clammy, damp and lonesome, and we 
must all go our narrow way to God, alone. But 
His Angels who brought Stanislaus Communion 

Ww. iv, 10-15. 



THE DEATH OF THE YOUNG 107 

must have walked with him through the tunnel, 
and His Angels must carry the sweet small bod- 
ies of dead infants through the dreadful place 
of loneliness into the warm home of Heaven and 
there, surely, the Angels must place these babes in 
the arms of the Mother of Christ. For us the 
bitterness remains; for the dead, the bitterness 
soon passes, and they are joyous in the thought 
that many years do not make a good life, that 
life consists in its goal achieved. As soon as we 
obtain Heaven we are young forever no matter 
how old we were when we died. 

Augustine reflects as follows: 

"You see how the hair grows gray and white 
as old age approaches. Sometimes you vainly 
seek a dark hair on the head of a man whose 
growing old is perfectly healthy and natural. And 
so when our life is such that the blackness of sin 
may be looked for in it and not found, this green 
old age is like a second youth, and will always 
be vigorous." 8 

St. Augustine mourned for his son Adeodatus, 
as we should mourn for the young whom God 
has called to Himself. Listen to the words of 
this great Saint. He tells how he and Alipius 
went down to Milan with the boy, all three to be 
baptized. The boy was then fifteen and surpassed 
in learning many scholars of ripe years. "I was 
perfectly astonished," says Augustine, "at that 
prodigy of wit." And then he adds: "Thou 
didst soon take away his life from the earth, and 
with more security I now remember him, having 
no fear, either for his childhood, or for his youth, 
or indeed at all for the man." 9 Here is resig- 
nation, and a just concept of what is best. 



108 THE HOME WORLD 

In another place the Saint finds fault with those 
parents who weep and mourn grievously for the 
death of their sons and do not weep when they 
see their children sinning. This is not Christian, 
for the boy is more surely and utterly dead when 
he sins than when God takes him away from sin. 

St. John Chrysostom has many beautiful reflec- 
tions on death. "If a just man dies," he exclaims, 
"rejoice! He is safe; he is free from future 
fears." Again he says: "If you loved the dead, 
rejoice too, because he has finished his voyage over 
the billows of this present life. But if your son 
has departed from this tottering and mortal king- 
dom to rule and command otherwheres, do not 
desire him to come thence that you might see 
him. When he has gone to a greater and better 
land, can you not bear his absence for a little 
while? You have given back what was given 
you; you have returned your trust. Do not be 
troubled when you see your treasure safely se- 
cured in a treasure-house unbreakable." 10 

10 Homily xxxii, on Matt. 




CHAPTER IX 

PEACE SOUGHT AND FOUND 

'^' ATIONS may sigh loudly for that perma- 
-L^" nent peace and world tranquillity which will 
result in disarming the soldier and converting the 
munition factory into a bakery. But the sword 
will never be made into a ploughshare, nor the 
bayonet into a horseshoe until morality has secured 
undisputed empire in the wild hearts of men. We 
may hope to do away with the soldier; we may 
say: "His helmet now shall make a hive for 
bees," 1 or, 



Take away the 9vvord ; 
States can be saved without it 



and forget the fact that man is ruled by his soul, 

that no amount of external legislation will ever 

force a man to be moral. If you take away the 

< soldier's bayonet, he might fall a-fighting with 

I his fists, and the sooner we train our souls in the 

peace that passeth understanding, the more quickly 

will we be able to govern our fists and swords. 

This first training in the ways of peace should 

P be had at home. If the home-world is a battle- * 

Afield, why should we talk of inter-national peace ? 

Quite bluntly does St. Thomas of Villanova re- 



r 



^eele. 2 Lytton, Richelieu. 

109 



no THE HOME WORLD 

) 

I ants are in concord, what is home but Heaven; 

I yet if discord is among them, what is home but 

, Hell?" Truly, home with an atmosphere of peace 
for the deeds of love is Paradise, and hopeless is 
that home which knows not such repose. 

Where peace 
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes 
That comes to all. 3 

Now the peace of God surpasses all peace and 
the peace of the people in the Church is the glory 
of her ministers, said St. Augustine ; and the prin- 
ciple foundation of domestic peace, in the mind 
of St. Chrysostom, indeed, of all good things for 
the home, is in this that the wife should be in 
accord with her husband, for where this concord 
exists, nothing sorrowful can happen. "With 
three things my spirit is pleased, which are ap- 
proved before God and men; the concord of 
brethren, and the love of neighbors, and man and 
,wife that agree well together." 4 

Peace is nothing more than that tranquillity 
which results from the common and secure posses- 
sion of a good thing. ')■ Thus, when a man is at 
peace with God, his will is in accord with the 
divine will, as if God and man possessed the same 
good thing. "This is true peace, not to be divided 
from the will of God, and to take joy in those 
things which can belong only to God. For when 
sensuality in no way resists the will, and the will 
in no way contradicts the reason, then there is 
t serenity of mind and the kingdom of God." 5 

This accord and order must show itself in the 
' man's actions, for never can a man be said to 

*Milton, Paradise Lost, i. *EccIus. xxv, 1. "St. Leo, Republic. 






^>H%? 



PEACE SOUGHT AND FOUND 1 1 1 

| possess peace whose actions are against God's law. 

: "Peace is tranquil liberty," said Plato, and in the 

i Christian sense this saying means that the man 
who has peace will act in accord with God's law, 

: never for the moment losing tranquillity of mind 
in the fear of disorder. True liberty is subjec- 
tion to God's will, and when we use this liberty 

\ we have serenity of mind and true peace. 

"Much peace have they that love Thy law, and 
tp them there is no stumbling block." 6 

f The happy boy will whistle to himself, regard- 
less of the passers-by who smile at the shrill ex- 
pression of his peaceful soul. In the same way, 
the man who is enjoying the true liberty of peace, 
will express his joy in actions that speak loudly 

\of God to all the world. ' So the Angels sang on 
the first Christmas morning: "And on earth, 
peace to men of good will"; and the will of man 
is good when it joins itself to the will of God. 

If there is to be peace in your home-world, there 
must be this submission to God's will, whether in 
joy or sorrow, in riches or poverty, in sickness or 
health. Never is our tranquil possession of God 
seriously menaced until we lose sight of His law 
by too much inspection of ourselves. The closer 
you put your face to the mirror, the less clear will 
your features be, simply because nothing is dis- 
tinct in a false perspective. In the same way, when 
a man looks into his own soul for peace and finds 
only himself, he cannot see God and will never 
enjoy what he is seeking. In the home-world, 
when self looms larger than the Divine Will, self 
becomes all in all, and grows monstrous feeding 
on itself. Peace cannot be where selfishness is 
the pig in the sty, and there was never yet an 

"Ps- exviii. 166. 



A 



ii2 THE HOME WORLD 

I honest, sincere man, who after carefully explor- 
ing the regions of his soul, averred himself satis- 
fied, content and peaceful as he was. "Who re- 
sists Him and has peace?" 7 "There is no peace 
to the wicked, saith the Lord." 8 

On the other hand, when man, gazing down the 
perspective of daily life and humbly acknowledg- 
ing that he is not all in all, that God is in 
His Heaven above, granting peace only through 
union of wills, then he comes to realize the beauty 
of life, its tranquillity, ease of soul, contentment, 
and the serene possession of the greatest good, 
God. "Transient peace is a trace of eternal 
peace," said St. Gregory, and surely our peace 
then will consist in the certainty that at last we 
can never sin against God, and are in no danger 
of ever losing His pleasure. This is our meaning 
when we pray that the dead may rest in peace; 
that is, we wish that they may rest secure in God's 
grace forever. 
/ St. Augustine describes peace as "serenity of 
! mind, tranquillity of soul, simplicity of heart, the 
bond of love, the strength of charity. This it is 
which does away with dissensions, settles wars, 
represses rage, tramples the proud under foot, 
loves the lowly, brings agreement in discord, har- 
mony to enemies. It is sweet to all, and knows 
neither loftiness nor empty prating. The man 
who has it, let him hold on to it. Let the man 
who has mislaid it, hunt for it again, and let 
him who has lost it search eagerly for it." 9 

And this is the gift Christ left us. "Peace I 
leave with you, My peace I give unto you; not as 
the world giveth, do I give unto you. Let not 
your heart be troubled, nor let it be afraid." 10 

Vob ix, 4. s Is. xlviii, 22. 'The City of God. "John xiv, 27. 






PEACE SOUGHT AND FOUND 1 13 

It is the wish ever on the lips of Paul in address- 
ing his different congregations. "The Kingdom 
of God is not meat and drink; but justice and 
peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost." 11 "The peace 
of God which surpasseth all understanding, keep 
your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus." 12 "In 
His days shall justice spring up," says the Psalm, 
"and abundance of peace." 13 

St. Augustine pictures the man who has not 
peace, and denies him the name of Christian. "He 
who has not peace of heart, lips and deed, cannot 

! be called a Christian. He who does not hope for 
peace, places his life and foot on slippery paths; 
he sails his ship in a storm; walks on a precipice 

■■'., and sows his crops on sand." 14 

There is another union of wills which is most 
common when home is mentioned. Unless our 
homes are in desert places, we have neighbors; and 
domestic peace very often means right relations 
with the family next door. When Johnny throws 
his baseball and breaks a window, he upsets two 
worlds and demoralizes the concord existing be- 
tween good neighbors. No policeman can settle 
such a dispute. This is intimate matter touching 
the welfare of families, and there have been many 
instances of lifelong harshness between neighbors, 
that could have been settled by a little judicious 
humor rightly applied. The baseball in the hands 
of an active and careless boy breaks hearts as 
well as glass, and to establish peace again is to 
bring neighbors into accord and union. 

St. Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians ex- 
horts them to this union: "I beseech you, breth- 
ren, by the name of Our Lord, Jesus Christ, that 
you all speak the same thing, and that there be no 

"Rom. xiv, 17. vpkilipp. iv, 7. ls Ps. lxxi. "Sermon ii. 



ii 4 THE HOME WORLD 

schisms among you, that you be perfect in the 
same mind and the same judgment." 15 And did 
not Our Lord Himself urge this neighborly peace 
in His instructions to the Apostles setting out upon 
their journey? "Into whatsoever house you enter, 
first say: "Peace be to this house. And if the 
son of peace be there, your peace shall rest upon 
him; but if not, it shall return to you." 16 
' We must be united by uninterrupted chanty to 
resist the attacks of demons on the tranquillity of 
our souls. Petty quarrels are out of place and 
make us play into the hands of our enemy. He 
has lost his possession of the great Good for all 
eternity, and, conscious of this, writhing under the 
curse of selfish pride, his only delight is to wage 
unending and bitter war against our souls. There 
will never be a disarmament parley in Hell. 
Lucifer will forever send his cohorts to besiege 
and bomb the souls of men. Only in our great 
Ally, God, is our security, only in Him is our 
peace. How absurd is man to pay his peace of 
soul for sin. He has squandered his hope of 
solace and beggared himself for a momentary 
trifle. What is sin, after all, but a hoax. The 
man has been sold a gold brick; his good money 
is in the devil's pocket and he has nothing for 
himself but a soiled soul and a lifelong regret. A 
half-hour's ecstacy demands the price of eternal 
remorse. These men are unable to look you in 
the eye, they have been such fools, and their case 
is always the same since Solomon bartered his 
wisdom for the smiles of dancing women. \ Men 
like this slink cowering on the backstairs of the 
world, thrust forth from their own good repute 
and the worthy councils of strong men. 

1B I Cor. i, 10. "Luke x. 5. 



PEACE SOUGHT AND POUND 115 

Neighborly discord embitters the home circle. 
Those people next door become evil genii, 
and to pass them on the street, with head high, 
and eyes staring blankly, is simply to gratify your 
selfishness. The best way to pay off your grudge 
would be to salute your enemy politely, remark 
on the fine weather, and: "How well you look this 
morning! The air is bracing, these days, isn't it? 
By the way, Johnny is all upset about breaking 
your window. I'm so sorry!" 

y Who could resist you. if this method of pro- 
cedure were followed! ^"Make peace with your 
enemy," urges Augustine; "You know not when 
life will end, and when it is ended there remains 
the Judge, the grim Guard, and the Prison. But 
if you have kept peace and agreement with your 
enemy, instead of a Judge you will find a Father; 
instead of a grim Guard, an Angel lifting you 
up onto the bosom of Abraham; instead of a 

, Prison, you will find Paradise.Y 17 
* In another place Augustine remarks that he 
would much prefer not to have an enemy than to 
conquer him, and the poet Wordsworth sums it 
all up beautifully in these two lines ; 

But hushed be every thought that springs 
From out the bitterness of things. 

Shakespeare looks rather more philosophically on 
the matter. 

What's gone and what's past help 
Should be past grief. 18 

Peace with God and with the neighbor means in- 
crease of tranquillity for ourselves. This is one 

"The Word of Cod. "Winter's Tale. 



ti6 THE HOME WORLD 

of the immediate benefits produced by concord 
between wills. "Blessed are the peacemakers," 
says Our Lord, for they shall be called the chil- 
dren of God." 1 ^ And St. Peter says: "He that 
will love life and see good days ... let him 
decline from evil and do good; let him seek after 
peace and pursue it." 20 "Have peace," said St. 
Paul, "and the God of peace and love shall be 
with you." 21 

The proverb has it that besides being something 
worth acquiring for its own sake, peace is a per- 
petual joy. "A secure mind is like a continual 
ieast." 23 
/ There can be no doubt, then, that peace is some- 
i thing desirable. Hence we naturally inquire into 
j the means of obtaining it. What must we pay for 
peace? How much of self must we spend to buy 
union with God's will? For the further removed 
we get from self, the more peaceful we become. 
The first means is, certainly, to obey the law of 
God. Isaias, speaking for the Lord, says: "O 
that thou hadst hearkened to my commandments; 
thy peace had been as a river." 23 This is the 
direct, level, well-paved road to peace, the observa- 
tion of God's commandments. Make no compro- 
mise. You do not win peace by silencing your 
conscience. You win it by resisting evil in every 
form, and the standard book to read on this sub- 
ject of resistance is the book God wrote for Moses, 
the tablet of the ten commandments. This means 
suffering since no one can observe the command- 
ments and utterly please himself. "Do this!" 
"Don't do that!" Such expressions arouse the 
contradictory part of our nature, and we often 
enough feel like saying: "I won't do it!" "I will 

"Matt, v, ix. *>I Pet. iii, 10. "II Cor. xiii, 11. n Prov. xv, 15. 
**Is. xlviii, 18. 



PEACE SOUGHT AND FOUND 117 

do it!" And while we fancy that we are harming 
the one who commands, we are really harming no 
one but ourselves. The sudden consciousness of 
this idea robs us of peace, for we do sometimes 
realize that by not observing the law of God, we 
make fools of ourselves. 

Ruskin remarks on this suffering as the root of 
peace : "For many a year to come the sword of 

r every righteous nation must be whetted to save or 
subdue; nor will it be by patience of others' suffer- 
ing, but by the offering of your own, that you will 
ever draw nearer to the time when the great 
change shall pass upon the iron of the earth: 
when men shall beat their swords into plough- 
shares, and their spears into pruning hooks; 
neither shall they learn war any more." 24 

Peace and justice are friends and go hand in 
hand. When a man is just, he is observing the 
ten commandments; and when he is just, he is 
at peace. The one trouble with us is that while 
we all want peace, we do not all desire to take 
the means to get it. St. Paul's wish to his people 
was ever this: "Grace and Peace to you," for 
they go hand in hand. 

A second means of obtaining this jewel of price 
is to cut deep into the roots of our selfishness. 
How much we value the pronoun "/." How wise 
was Seneca when he remarked that if the words 

£ "thine and mine" were removed from language, 
we would lead most tranquil lives. The reason 
underlying the saying is the natural selfishness of 
men, so that when YOU have what / want, there 
is discord, jealousy, envy, avarice, lying, anger 
and hate. Could these foul accretions on the soul 
(be cleansed away, we would have peace; or, in 

\ "The Two Paths. 






n8 THE HOME WORLD 

other words, self is lying like a snarling beast in 
the dark caverns of discord. Do away with the 
beast and you will know peace. 

The love of God is a sure means of peace. Not 
only is our will in union with His, but we are 
alone in a solitude of heart, soul and action with 
the Almighty. This love the saints experienced. 
They built themselves solitudes by expelling all 
things that would not be in keeping with the pres- 
ence of God, and entertaining God is most cer- 
tainly the creature's highest expression of confi- 
dent love. 

And have we not the real union with God 
every time we receive Him in Holy Commu- 
nion? This is peace, for at that moment, and 
during the precious moments that follow, we 
possess all Good. He unites Himself to us, and 
we cling closely to Him, knowing at once our 
own unworthiness, but relying on His wish to 
give us peace of soul by giving us Himself. 
Then we are of one heart and one mind and 
one soul. 

St. Bernard names four powerful impediments 
to peace, namely: a sin that keeps gnawing at us; 
bitter anxieties; overweening affections, and 
troubles that keep us stretched on the cross. But 
perhaps all can be reduced to inordinate desires, 
as is pointed out by St. James: "From whence are 
wars and contentions among you? Are they not 
hence, from your concupiscences, which war in 
your members." 25 

The helps to peace which Kempis mentions are 
proofs that unselfishness and humility are the 
greatest sources of this virtue. "Son, now will I 
teach thee the way of peace and true liberty. 






PEACE SOUGHT AND FOUND 119 

Study, my son, to do rather the will of another 
than thy own. Ever choose rather to have less 
than more. Always seek the lowest place, and to 
be subject to every one. Desire always and pray 
that the will of God may be entirely fulfilled in 
thee. Behold such a one entereth into the borders 
of peace and rest." 26 

This is the peace that should be founded in 
our homes. , The first cradle of peace is the old 
home, and the gleam of peace illuminates that be- 
loved world more brilliantly than any other. In 
the gentle influence of mother and father, sisters 
and brothers, there flows into the soul a stream 
of contentment, tranquillity and repose that is 
strangely and sorrowfully absent once the border 
of the front door has been crossed and the tumult 
of the outside world admitted into our lives. 
Peace is the cement holding together the stones 
of the state, and though many men make a social 
community, still each individual would be a 
separate community apart from the others if 
peace, the union and bond of society, did not rule 
all. Let each man rule himself in utter disregard 
,of his fellow men, and there will never be peace, 
for there will never be union of wills. How 
.severe is the havoc wrought in the sick body by 
the discord of one of its members. A sick stomach 
Jias upset nations, for the actions of a man are 
shadows of his healthy or unhealthy body, and 
Kings, Statesmen, and Generals have been known 
to be sick at critical periods of the world's his- 
tory. Certain attacks would never have been or- 
dered if the General had been feeling well, and 
many a King has lost his throne because a sick 
stomach gave him a headache and the headache 

"Imitation of Christ III, xxiii. 



120 THE HOME WORLD 

caused him to answer a wiser man in a petulant 
. manner. 

"Ne'er to meet and ne'er to part, is peace," 
said the poet Young, and the home alone gives that 
place of permanent abode where there are few 
partings and few strange meetings. < Home is the 
training school wherein we learn the lessons of 
peace, the story of abiding contentment.';, Of 
home we can pray as the Church prays: 

"Visit, O Lord, we beseech Thee, this dwelling, 
and drive far from it all the snares of the enemy; 
may Thy holy Angels dwell in it, to guard us in 
peace, and may Thy blessing be upon us always, 
through Our Lord, Jesus Christ, Thy Son, Who 
liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the 
Holy Spirit, God, world without end. Amen." 















CHAPTER X! 

THE HOME FEAST OF MOTHERS AND CHILDREN 

MpHERE are times in the year, just as there are 
■*■ times in our lives, when fear of Our Lord 
is more dominant than our love for Him. Lent, 
for instance, is a time for sorrow and fear. The 
Church robes herself in black and mourns for the 
dead Christ. His white, stark body looms on the 
cross against its sullen, wild background of angry 
sky. Pain, torture, cruel anguish are written in 
blood across His brow and in His red, gaping 
wounds. His mother is bowed to the ground at 
His feet and the darkness in her heart is more 
impenetrable than the darkness of the skies. 

There is fear of Him in all hearts. Death is 
very seldom lovely, and His death, above all, was 
horrible. In our souls there are, of course, love 
and pity and contrition, but does not fear pre- 
dominate? He is dead; we helped to kill Him; 
what will happen to us? That, perhaps, is the 
way our selfish minds reason. 

Easter is a time of joy just as is Christmas. 
Easter is the greatest feast of the year, for if 
Christ be not risen from the dead then is our 
faith vain. When He broke the seal of the tomb, 
He stamped the seal of His Divine authority on 
our religion. Hence joy is unbounded. 

But you will remark that this joy has an aspect 
121 



122 THE HOME WORLD 

of relief about it. The sudden change from sor- 
row to joy is startling. He was dead. We 
mourned bitterly, for we were as responsible as 
the Jews. Things looked black as death for us. 
But now He is risen and, rising, has guaranteed to 
us our own resurrection. So the joy is a relief in 
contrast to great sorrow and dread. 

Now there is a feast in the year that gives us 
the purest kind of joy. There is not the least 
sign of fear. Grown-up emotions are absent. 
Indeed, this feast is not for grown-ups primarily, 
and they can enjoy it in reflected light only. But 
for all that, their joy is very pure and fearless, 
since this feast is the great one of the home-world. 

What can be more innocent than a new-born 
babe? What can be more pure and innocent 
than a young girl who is at the same time a mother 
and a virgin? You have seen beauty in art and 
nature. You have seen the most beautiful of 
God's handiwork in man's noble form, but art, 
standing before this Maiden Mother and her 
Baby, is stuttering of tongue, lame of hand and 
altogether flat and unprofitable in the results of its 
labors. There are some things an artist cannot 
express satisfactorily. One of them is the soft, 
rounded, ruddy beauty of a new-born child's face 
and limbs; another is the young mother's smile 
when she looks into her child's eyes and sees her- 
self staring at herself, as if she had but just now 
come back from a long voyage into the clouds that 
surrounded heaven. 

So for real Christmas emotions we must leave 
the grown-ups, men especially, and turn to the 
children, associating them, naturally, with their 
mothers. Men are in the way, be they artists, 



THE HOME FEAST 



123 




soldiers, bankers or laborers ; but if the man is a 
father, he may stand in the doorway and gaze on 
with becoming reverence. 

In every birthday there is joy, but there is also 
a tear, for the past can never be again, and 
many a mother has wept silently in the seclusion 
of her darkened room, over the birthdays of her 
children. She was happy! But the baby does not 
exist any more. It is the strong, strong man 
whose step comes heavily up the stairs to her 
room. That son was her baby and the son may 
not have been all that his mother wished and 
prayed for, when she rocked him in her arms. 

Hence, in our birthdays there is usually a tear 
with the joy, a tear for the days that can never 
come again; for the past that could have been 
better, and joy for the goodness of God in giving 
children, in granting life up to this year, in thanks- 
giving for the benefits of a home. For not all a 
mother's dreams come true and not all a child's 
sins are heartless. 

But in this birthday of Christ there is not a tear. 
There is only joy. And the situation is this. A 
poor young girl, perhaps seventeen years of age, 
the most beautiful of Eve's daughters gives birth 
to her first-born Son. She has been cast off from 
human habitation because there was no room for 
her at the inn, and has been forced to seek shelter 
with the brute beasts in their cavern on the hill- 
side. Here is the box from which the cow and 
the ass have been wont to eat their grain. Is 
there no better bed for her Son? Perhaps some 
old discarded cradle may be found in the corner; 
but noj there is nothing save the manger, and it is 
here that the young girl lays her small Son, and 



I2 4 THE HOME WORLD 

it is from a manger that the God-Man gazes for 
the first time into the adoring eyes of His beauti- 
ful Mother, and she saw in His eyes the beauty of 
the Heaven that could not contain Him. 

Outside the stable and up where the sky is so 
bright, with more than the cold wintry splendor of 
the stars, a music sounds sweeter far than men 
have ever heard. The Angels sing thus only 
when Christ is born. To Him, of course, there 
is nothing new or strange about the song. And 
to Mary's ears there is a perfect fitness, an ap- 
propriateness, that does not allow the singing to 
attract her attention from the Boy's face. But 
to Joseph, gazing reverently, this song is an amaz- 
ing thing, these trumpets and choruses from the 
skies are amazing things ; and so for the shepherds 
back in the snow-covered hills, this burst of angelic 
song is an amazing thing, and they gaze with 
startled eyes at one another. When the voice 
rings out — "Glory to God in the highest and on 
earth peace to men of good will" — they fall down 
on their faces and adore. 

The poor shepherds watching their flocks on 
the hills, see the Angels and hear the music of 
their trumpets and their songs. Poor shepherds 
on the hills, and Herod the magnificent in his 
palace ! Poor shepherds on the hills, shivering in 
the cold of the winter nights, and great Caesar 
Augustus in his palace in Rome, master of the 
world! Why, Herod and Caesar can command 
music from the finest singers in the world! But 
Angels do not sing for them. Angels sing for 
poor shepherds; Angels sing when a poor girl 
lays her Son in straw, in the feed-box of dumb 
animals, in the borrowed comfort of an animal 



THE HOME FEAST 125 

shelter on a cold hillside, in Caesar's world domain 
and Herod's little kingdom. Surely a strange 
bed for the King of Heaven and Earth to lie 
upon! 

Watch the procession over the hills as the shep- 
herds drive on their flocks in the direction of the 
poor stable. Every shepherd knew that old, ram- 
shackle shed or cave, just as he would know every 
other nearby shelter in time of storm. Often that 
old man and that strong young fellow had folded 
their ewes and lambs in the very place until the 
biting blasts should die away and the rioting snow 
should cease. So they drive their flocks ahead of 
them and the young shepherds carry the lambkins 
on their broad shoulders and the older men tarry 
behind with the mother ewes. There are some 
boys with the shepherds and to them the dogs are 
the most interesting animals of all. These are the 
wise old dogs who run here and there with great 
noise of barking and wild swishing of tails as they 
gallop now on this side, now on that, keeping 
the sheep all orderly in the line of march. Now 
the procession passes over this hill and around 
those rocks, and into the valley where the frozen 
stream threads the bottom lands. Once across 
the valley and up the side of the opposite hill, 
they will have reached their goal. They will see 
the God-Man! 

And who were they to be so privileged? Cer- 
tainly they made a strange group to be hastening 
to their King. Surely, it was a strange gathering 
to receive the invitation direct from Heaven and 
in the pleasing form of angelic music, to be pres- 
ent at the cave of Bethlehem on that morning! 
And if you searched up and down the land for 



126 THE HOME WORLD 

poorer, humbler, more simple-minded men, you 
could not have found them. They wore their 
hearts on the sleeves of their coats and God, seeing 
the purity and simplicity of those hearts, gladly 
sent His Angels to invite them of all men to the 
birthday reception of His only Son. 

Now you will remember that these shepherds 
feared the Angels. But where is it recorded that 
when they reached the cave and saw the young 
girl leaning over her Babe, where is it recorded 
that they feared? 

They said not a word but offered their lambs, 
perhaps, or, speaking in whispers to Joseph, 
blessed him and asked his blessing in return. 
But whether they spoke or not, they surely never 
raised their eyes from the young girl by the 
manger; they never looked away from the 
Mother's or the Son's face. 

And fear! It was not in their hearts. They 
did not knov/ what it was in that Presence. Who 
could fear a Baby and His Mother or the gentle 
Saint who looked on and adored? Only love 
was in their hearts, only joy, only thanksgiving, 
only a great, marvellous, all-pervading peace; for 
God had come among His people and here one 
could see the very Son of God, His maiden 
Mother, and the strong guardian of them both; 
here one could see the home Christ lived in, and 
all the time the music of the Angels sounded in 
the heavens. But the music was gradually for- 
gotten, as the shepherds looked on the faces of 
the Mother and her Child. 

Now that is Christmas. When you think of that 
scene in the cave, do you grow fearful, and sad, 
and is your joy in any way tinged with relief or 



THE HOME FEAST 127 

dread? Purity and peace, simplicity and holiness 
are there, and no fear. The Herods and the 
Caesars among us will never know that there is a 
glorious birthday, but the simple shepherds among 
us will know, and will not exchange that knowledge 
and the sight of the Mother and Child for all 
the Empire of Augustus, for all the Kingdom 
of Herod. 

Christmas, after all, is a family feast, and who 
so poor among us as not to claim a home and 
love and the affection of friend and the respect of 
our fellow men?^The home is the great central 
pivot on which the world turns. Take it away 
and the world must crash down of its own weight 
like a small boy's top that has lost its spinning 
power. The world is a chaotic habitation for 
brute beasts, if the home is ruined. 

You have seen tremendous buildings, churches, 
office-buildings, monuments, that startle by their 
grace and beauty and massiveness. But what you 
cannot see in these expressions of man's genius is 
the foundation. That is hidden deep in the earth 
away from the eye, and the higher the building, 
the deeper the foundation. "If," says St. Augus- 
tine, "you contemplate raising a high and noble 
edifice, be first intent upon the basis of humility. 
When a man wishes and prepares to raise a solid 
structure, the greater the building is to be, the 
deeper he goes for the foundation. When the 
structure is finished, it is raised aloft in the air, 
but he who digs the foundation goes deep into 
the heart of the earth. Thus, before reaching its 
height, the building has a lowly beginning, from 
which it is raised high into the air." 1 It is the 
same way with the home. The greatness of any 

Sermon lix. 



128 THE HOME WORLD 

country is nothing but a mocking Tower of Babel, 
sure to collapse, unless the home be the founda- 
tion. If our nation builds its glory on money, 
it will fall, just as surely as the power that was 
Rome fell before the onrush of barbarians. If the 
nation builds its glory on a man's reason irrespec- 
tive of God, the nation will fall just as cultured 
Greece fell before the materialism of Rome. If 
the nation builds its glory on a freedom that is 
license, on a freedom that unbinds the marriage 
tie; on a freedom that teaches men to disregard 
the rights of their fellow men in the wild rush for 
higher wages, that allows men to choke the last 
cent from the poor, then the nation is not building 
glory but ruin, and as surely as Rome and Greece 
fell into the dust and are dust today, just so 
surely will this nation fall and her name be used 
to point a moral. 

The true foundation of a great nation is the 
i homeland the cave of Bethlehem is the rock on 
which the home is built, for purity was there, and 
obedience was there, and the two weaknesses of 
our nation today are looseness in regard to mar- 
riage and the tossing aside of obedience to legiti- 
mate authority. Without obedience there can be 
no order, no law; without purity there can be no 
home, and in the home there must be both sub- 
jection to authority, which implies law, and 
purity, which implies love. With love and law 
the world will get along very well, and we may 
not be exactly just in blaming Herod and Caesar 
for not hearing the Angel's song. Some today are 
both blind and deaf, since they do not heed the 
greatest lesson taught by Bethlehem, the lesson of 
home. 



THE HOME FEAST 129 

Now many and many a long year has passed 
since the shepherds stood at the cave, and we must 
needs use our imagination to summon up the scene 
even in faint sketchy lines and colors. This is 
where art fails. But the emotions awakened in 
the shepherds, in Mary and in Joseph, are in our 
hearts today just as if the cave were in the next 
street and we could still hear the Angels singing. 
Many a Catholic home has been at some time or 
other the replica of the cave of Bethlehem, and 
for that reason it is that Christmas is a mothers' 
and children's feast. True, if the father and 
the men are good, they may be allowed to stand at 
the door with Joseph and the shepherds. 

I once saw a mother place a young baby in her 
husband's arms. The man was a giant in size 
and his two hands made a large cradle for his 
child, and yet with all his strength and stature, 
there was never a more awkward sight in this 
world, as he stood there with arms outstretched 
looking at the child in his hands. The poor man 
knew not what to do, so he looked at his wife, 
at the child, at the opposite wall, and the tear in 
his eye was big with his heart's emotions. Then, 
of course, the baby cried and the big man's fright 
was pitiable. The mother quickly snatched the 
child away from the huge hands and soothed the 
rumpled feelings. 

"You can work for Jimmie and me," she said 
smiling, "but really, Jim, you can't handle the 
baby. You look too absurd." 

And that is just what Christmas teaches. The 
men can work for the Mother and the Babe, but 
the near approach, the place close to the Crib, is 
reserved for the mothers and children. The men 



i 3 o THE HOME WORLD 

must look on and not appear too awkward. Still 
there is no fear in their hearts, for Joseph's was 
flooded with peace, and men after all do gather 
some peace in being near St. Joseph. Men are 
the guardians of purity and innocence, and who 
will say that in our times there is no need for such 
strong, great men, simple in life and heart, to 
shepherd the mothers and their little ones? 

Christmas is the one time in the year when all 
old men are children and all old ladies good cooks. 
For Christmas, since it is a mothers' and chil- 
dren's feast, must of necessity be a home feast, 
and that means good things to eat, tempting odors 
from the kitchen around eleven o'clock, the smell 
of mince pie, the enticing odors of plum pudding, 
roast turkey, sweet potatoes, and so on until the 
nose reels under the overwhelming assaults. 

And if you peep into the kitchen with the boys 
of the family, you will see the old grandmother 
sticking an inquiring fork into the pie; you will 
see the anxious mother, flushed and ruddy, stoop- 
ing at the oven door, apron over her hands, wait- 
ing for just the right moment to investigate the 
browning of that turkey. You will see the girls 
cutting raisin bread, or preparing the dishes, all 
the time watchfully guarding the door against any 
sudden inroads by Johnny or Joe or Bill. And even 
father is watched suspiciously by his daughters, 
for though he does feel his responsibility in giving 
a good example to his sons, still he would like to 
get into the kitchen and cause a disturbance. 
Hence the suspicious glances of his knowing 
daughters. You may be sure of one thing. He is 
not minding the baby as his wife bade him, and 
if you will look into the parlor under the Christ- 






THE HOME FEAST 13 1 

mas tree, you will behold the seraphic infant as 
free as air and as irresponsible, investigating, with 
the help of a grinning grandfather, the inside of 
Bill's new drum. 

This year the home means a lot to the soldiers 
who are the heroes of young and old. The 
thought of the war is not dimmed. They know 
what Christmas without a home means. They 
will sit around your dinner table, perhaps, and 
tell you what they ate in France. It makes no 
difference if they have told it all before. Veterans 
must be allowed a certain amount of talkativeness. 
One Sergeant said: 

"Last Christmas, no, the Christmas before last, 
I had a cup of muddy water in the morning for 
breakfast and marched on that all day, with the 
pack growing heavier and the tin hat like a block 
of lead on my head. Both legs were soaked with 
the mud of sunny France. In the evening, just as 
it was getting dark, we halted and discovered that 
the kitchens were lost back on the road. The men 
did not speak nicely of those kitchens. But one 
man of our platoon found a pig trying to escape in 
the by-ways of the little village. The pig was 
soon ours. Then another fellow, on the hunt like 
all of us, discovered a rooster, very old and feeble, 
wandering about aimlessly, looking for death. 
The Lieutenant said it was blind or it never would 
have allowed itself to be caught. Anyway it got 
revenge. We served the old pig done up in the 
old rooster's feathers and had some potatoes for 
stuffing with a spoonful of rum thrown in. Each 
man got about an inch of pig and an eighth of 
an inch of rooster. Now our platoon was lucky. 
The rest of the men were not so fortunate in 



i 3 2 THE HOME WORLD 

rinding pigs and roosters. But this meal, Mother ! 
i wouldn't take all the roosters in France for one 
bite of this mince pie ! We had to save the rooster 
from the other platoons at the point of the bay- 
onet. But this pie is worth dying for." 

Home and Christmas! The mother and her 
children! The father there as the guardian of 
them all, and not a bit of fear in any heart! Only 
peace and joy and love for the Infant God look- 
ing up into His Mother's face; only the sounds of 
Angel music and the bowed adoring heads of the 
shepherds and Joseph. 

Surely, Christmas is the home-feast of the pur- 
est, most innocent joy. 



CHAPTER XI 
LOVE, THE MOTIVE POWER OF LIFE 

THE home-world fosters one great guiding 
affection for all our lives. Home and love 
are synonyms, and if this is so, we ought clearly 
to consider what love is. The subject should not 
be so much in the background of our conversa- 
tion and daily thoughts, since it is the one supreme 
concept of the Gospel, the new note in the music 
of life, sounded by the Son of God. 

The man who has once tasted the love of home 
is like the man who has once tasted the love of 
God. He becomes an epicure, fed to satiety with 
delicacies and in him there is left no coarse appe- 
tite for baser foods. God fills our hearts to com- 
plete satisfaction and we can never afterwards be 
content with any one lower than Himself. So the 
home while we are on earth fills us with the most 
complete satisfaction, and outside of it we are 
never really content, and the man who has not ex- 
perienced this satisfaction never understands what 
it is, though he may envy the happiness and sigh 
for what is not. Christ came to spread this fire 
of love upon the earth, and what is dearer to 
His Sacred Heart than that it should be enkindled 
in all the homes of the world? If love should 
exist anywhere it should exist in the home. 

But if we do not know what love means, we 

133 



i 3 4 THE HOME WORLD 

cannot be sure that we are on the great highway 
to Heaven. The reason is this. One day a 
Pharisee asked Our Lord what was the great com- 
mandment, and Our Lord answered: 

"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy 
whole heart and with thy whole soul and with thy 
whole mind. — And the second is like to this. 
Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." 

Now if we do not know what love means, we 
cannot be sure that we are keeping the great 
commandment of love, we cannot be certain that 
our homes are fountains of love. Our salvation 
depends on keeping these two commandments, 
love of God and love of the neighbor, and these 
commandments rest on love. 

At first sight, when you read anything, say a 
novel, with a love story in it, you are inclined 
to think that love is nothing more than a mere 
sentimental feeling towards some one; a mere 
emotion that is nice as long as it lasts. But these 
feelings, outside of novels, usually pass away like 
a breath of sultry wind. Nothing remains of them 
but the remembrance. The novels are wrong. 
Love is not a mere feeling. It is something 
greater, nobler, finer than that. Any home that 
fosters these feelings only is a frothy failure. 

Perhaps you have seen the picture in which the 
artist tries to express the terrible reality of the 
Deluge. He has been very clever, for it is no 
easy thing to paint on a small picture what the 
Deluge meant to the people it destroyed. The 
roar and hiss and thunder of the rising waters can- 
not be painted on a piece of canvas. The crack- 
ing and crumbling of homes, the shrieks of women 
and children, the moans of strong men, the whimp- 



LOVE," THE MOTIVE POWER 135 

ering and howling of savage beasts, the uproari- 
ous destruction of mountains and forests and all 
the beauty of earth in her youth — these things 
cannot be painted on a piece of canvas. So the 
artist has chosen one scene, a very high mountain 
top with the waters rising around it, for nothing 
can stop them until they have covered the whole 
earth and drowned every living thing, man and 
beast, except Noe and those with him. And on 
the summit of the mountain, with frightened eyes 
turned toward the waters, stands a magnificent 
monarch of the jungles, a huge tiger, and in her 
mouth is the last of her brood, a small cub which 
she has been able to save up to this moment by 
bringing it to the last place the waters can reach. 
And beside the tiger's cub is an infant held high 
in its mother's protecting arms while she is upheld 
in the strong arms of her husband. But the waters 
have already reached him and will soon sweep 
him away. Oh, if he could only keep them from 
his wife ! Oh, if she could only keep them from 
her child! 

We know that this is real love. There is the 
animal affection which urges the savage beast to 
save her cubs; there is the sturdy love of the 
husband for his wife; there is the pathetic, won- 
derful, inexpressible love of the mother for her 
babe. 

But do not consider them as they stand there 
on the mountain. Think of what they did to get 
there ! Think of how they suffered, of how they 
starved. Think of how they ran and ran from 
the pursuing waters until they fell flat with utter 
exhaustion. Think of how they sprang up again 
in dismay at the menacing enemy ever on their 



136 THE HOME WORLD 

heels. Think of how they toiled up hill after 
hill; over rocks and streams and mountains and 
through deep forests until at last they reached 
this place of a moment's safety for their little one. 
They proved their love before they ever reached 
that mountain, and their love consisted in doing 
something to save the child. Their love consisted 
in action. 

Not so long ago, I was talking to an American 
soldier who had seen a good bit of trench warfare 
in France. He described how sometimes the 
American trenches were only thirty or fifty yards 
from the trenches of the enemy, and between these 
two ditches, crowded with armed men ever on the 
alert for attack or repulse, there stretched a deso- 
late, lonely strip of land swept by shell fire, rifle 
fire, machine gun fire. This place was called "No 
Man's Land." 

"What was the worst thing you suffered in 
the trenches?" I asked him. 

"Father," he said very earnestly, "it was not 
standing up to your knees in mud waiting for the 
next shell to explode in your face. It was not 
that, nor was it the crackling of rifle fire and the 
buzzing and popping of machine guns, if you but 
held your tin hat on your rifle half a foof above 
the edge of the trench. It was not that nor was it 
the whirring of enemy airplanes, soaring like so 
many buzzards over your head, waiting. It was 
not that. But it was to hear in the middle of 
the night the groans coming from No Man's 
Land: the groans of some poor fellow wounded 
and dying out there with not a soul to help him 
through the gates of death; with not a hand to 
soothe his hrow and close his eyes when the 



LOVE, THE MOTIVE POWER 137 

suffering and the breath should have gone. That 
was hard. But it was far harder to hear these 
strong lads crying constantly for their mother. 
Time and time again, in the blackness of the night, 
from that most desolate spot on God's earth, came 
the cry, 'Mother! Mother!' — and there was not 
a soul to help him. That, Father, was the worst 
of all." 

Now do not look at the soldier dying there in 
No Man's Land. Do not consider his love for 
his country nor even for his mother. But look 
back on his life and see what it was that made 
the poor lad cry out for his mother. What was 
it but her deeds for him, her sufferings for him, 
her sacrifices for him, that made the soldier in 
the time of his greatest need cry out for the one 
who had done most for him in his life? For we 
all know that it is the mother's love that bursts 
into action, and it is her son, who, following a 
good example of love in action, can go out there 
on No Man's Land and die bravely for his 
country. 

One of the young Jesuits who had just been 
ordained at Woodstock was telling his brethren of 
the wonderful reverence of the people for him just 
as soon as the late Cardinal Gibbons had laid 
hands on his head. 

"What impressed you most?" asked some one, 
and he replied instantly that when he went to the 
altar-rail after his first Mass to allow the people 
to kiss his newly-consecrated hands, a very old 
lady, stooped with years but supported by two stal- 
wart sons, took hold of his hands, looked up into 
his face and whispered : 

"My boy, I will not kiss your hands. But let 



i 3 8 THE HOME WORLD 

me press my lips to the fingers that have touched 
the pure, sacred Body of Christ my Lord." 

And she kissed the fingers that touch the Host 
every morning. It was a little thing, but the 
priest will never forget it. It was a little thing, 
but who will say that it did not prove the old 
lady's love for Our Lord? 

Love is action. The greatest love was Christ's 
for us. We would never have been able to open 
the gates of Heaven for ourselves or for our chil- 
dren if He had not come down and died for us, 
nailed to a tree. His was the noblest deed of 
love this world shall ever know. And it was a 
deed — death. No man can merely say, "I love 
God." 

Love is a deed. What have you done for God? 
Tell me that and then I shall know how you love 
God. Do something for your neighbor and you 
love your neighbor. The love of the mawky, 
sentimental novel is trash. The love that is real is 
the greatest thing on earth and in Heaven. Feel- 
ing and emotion enter into love, of course. See a 
mother nestling her infant on her breast. Has she 
feeling for the child? Certainly. Does she 
talk to it and tell it how much she loves it? 
But her greatest love is her deed for the child. 
Let a robber try to take the child from^her! 
Let some one try to injure it! Let the child 
grow sickly and wan. How her love bursts into 
action and her eyes will know no sleep, her lips 
will know no food until the heart of her heart 
is better. Deeds! Deeds! All real love con- 
sists in a deed. 

St. Thomas says that the soul which loves does 
great things and thinks them small; does many 



LOVE, THE MOTIVE POWER 139 

things and thinks them few; labors long and 
thinks it too short. 

There is a law of gravity in love. Our actions 
fall by their own weight either to earth and then 
they are selfish, or lightly leap to God and then 
they are done out of love. 

The Fathers of the Church commonly think 
that the Blessed Virgin died from love of God. 
If that question which her Son put to Peter had 
been asked of her in the days she lived on earth 
after the Resurrection, she could have answered 
it with all the fervor of her heart. "Lovest thou 
Me ?" How she would have sighed in her answer : 
"Lord, Thou knowest that I love Thee," and 
hence it is that love carried her back to Christ, 
when the ways of her life were ended. There 
must have been another Bethlehem in Heaven 
when Christ welcomed His Mother among the 
throngs of Angels; and Gabriel, the one who had 
seen her as a little maid when he brought word 
that she was to be the Mother of God, must have 
seen in her eyes the same love for God that he 
had seen when she bowed her head and said: "Be 
it done unto me according to thy word." 

Was not Magdalen's love a deed? She shamed 
herself before the sneering Pharisee and unloosed 
her hair and made of its beauty an instrument of 
lowly purpose, a towel even though it was of spun 
gold, and Christ submitting to her deed of love, 
praised her. "Many sins are forgiven her because 
she loved much." 1 

Love makes all hard and bitter things easy. 
What is difficult for the worker is easy for the 
lover. 

So when you read some foolish, mawkish novel 

*Luke vii, 47. 



i 4 o THE HOME WORLD 

that drivels its nonsense about a sighing, sentimen- 
tal something which the author calls love, you will 
know that the author is a wise man and knows 
how to make money with his typewriter. He is 
fooling you. Real love is not sentimental nor 
foolish. Real love is action even as Christ died 
for us because He loved us; even as a sword of 
sorrow pierced Mary's heart because she loved 
Him and us. Throw the novel into the fire and 
read the Gospels. 

When our children are far from us we still love 
them, and the actual presence of them in the house 
is not at all necessary for the warmth of our love. 
In the same way, we do not have to see God in 
order to love Him with all our hearts. St. 
Augustine explains this. "You will say to me: I 
do not see God. How am I to love what I do 
not see? Let me show you. . . . You love 
your friend, but perhaps your friend is an old man. 
What do you love in the old man? His curved 
body? His white head? The wrinkles on his 
forehead? The drawn cheeks? You do not love 
the body you see, because it is deformed. Where 
then, do you see what you love? You answer: he 
is faithful, therefore, you love faith. The same 
eyes by which you see faith make you see God." 8 

Listen to Father Faber : 

"Ah! only serve Jesus out of love! You can- 
not beat God in the strife of love! Only serve 
Jesus out of love, and, while your eyes are yet 
unclosed, before the whiteness of death is yet set- 
tled on your face, or those around you are sure 
that that last gentle breathing was indeed your last 
— oh, what an unspeakable surprise will you have 
had at the judgment-seat of your dearest Love, 

'Homily xxxviii, on John. 






LOVE, THE MOTIVE POWER 141 

while the songs of Heaven are breaking on your 
ears, and the glory of God is dawning on your 
eyes, to fade away no more forever!" 

Action is evidence of life, and love in the 
home-world is proof of that life in the home which 
Christ desired to kindle there. 



CHAPTER XII 
CONSULTING THE SPECIALIST 

THE question of health agitates peoples' minds 
more today than at any other time. Pes- 
tilence swept over the land during the last years. 
Its breath was death. Perhaps you saw the 
crowded undertakers' shops or the rough wooden 
coffins heaped up in the cemetery. Perhaps you 
know of some one who died. There is a grue- 
some story, quietly told, of course, that in certain 
places the clothes were stripped from some of 
the dead by vandals and the body put back a poor, 
cold, naked thing in the rough, unplaned and un- 
finished coffin. This sounds like the ancient tales 
of the body-snatchers, tales, you will recall, that 
you liked to hear because they were horrible and 
interesting. This is the same interest that wins 
a crowd of gaping idlers to the latest accident. 
But the whole history of the epidemic is morbid. 
The breath of pestilence was laden with poison 
and it is only the noble man who can keep his 
head and his smile when sudden death stalks near 
him. 

The home-world was devastated and a mad 
search was on foot for the specialist who could 
root out the pestilence. 

Now there are specialists for every kind of dis- 
ease. That a man should spend his life in try- 

142 



CONSULTING THE SPECIALIST 143 

ing to segregate a certain bacillus seems aston- 
ishing. Indeed, specialties seem absurd matters, 
since they are narrow by nature and sometimes in- 
finitesimal by agreement among the specialists 
themselves. But when a plague like the 
Spanish Influenza sends your son to bed, dying, 
you run to the specialist who can find and 
root out the bacillus or germ of the disease. 
Then you are converted to this idea of a man 
seeking and learning all he can about one little 
thing connected with the health or death of 
the body. 

Modern doctors lay great importance on the 
little, hidden things relating to health. There was 
a man suffering dreadfully from rheumatism. He 
had been on the rack for years. No relief seemed 
possible and yet he was cured by a dentist ! What, 
you say! A dentist cure rheumatism! Why, I 
thought a dentist fixed teeth? You are right. 
That's what the dentist did for the rheumatic man 
and since the teeth caused rheumatism, and the 
dentist fixed the teeth, the dentist cured the rheu« 
matism. 

Health has become the world's watchword. 
People shudder at dirt in any form, for dirt is a 
breeder of disease and disease is a breeder of 
death. Are the teeth foul and uncared for? 
Nowadays almost any disease may be predicted 
for you. Is the stomach abused? You will regret 
the abuse when you are on the operating table, per- 
haps with cancer, perhaps with ulcers. Your 
heart is weak? Then strains must be avoided, if 
you are to keep your feet on the land of the liv- 
ing and your head raised among your fellows. 
You read a great deal in poor light? The eyes 



144 THE HOME WORLD 

will suffer, for there is wear and tear going on, 
Whatever it is, the cause of the disease must be 
reached and cut out, even if parts of your body 
are to be cut away with it. And in the beginning, 
little things cause disease. You have seen a 
thunder-storm grow gradually from some small 
spirals of clouds in the blue sky. You may have 
seen the ocean heave and roll with mountains of 
hungry waters that in the beginning were only lit- 
tle ripples on the face of the deep. So it is with 
disease. 

The best place to see an expert searching for 
and cutting away the root of disease is in an 
operating room. The place is not at all what 
you imagine. The room is like an artist's studio 
for light and the nurses have scrubbed and cleaned 
it until a speck of dirt is an abomination. When 
the surgeon operates he is dressed in immaculate 
white; the instruments have been sterilized with 
the utmost care; the nurses too, are swathed in 
white ; the surgeon and his assistants wear rubber 
gloves that no infection may result either for 
themselves or the patient. And when the opera- 
tion is finished, how wonderfully is the patient 
cared for; how jealously is the wound cleansed, 
dressed, bound and watched. For little things are 
causes of big catastrophies. The little things 
must be avoided. 

A nun once told a very sad story. There was a 
brilliant young surgeon who had extraordinary 
success in handling cases of blood-poisoning. Any 
infection here would mean danger of death, and 
this surgeon, unfortunately, had not taken proper 
care and so became infected. In two days he was 
dead, and the tiniest of cuts on his finger had ad- 



CONSULTING THE SPECIALIST 145 

mitted the deadly poison into his veins and laid 
him in the grave. 

But this must not be forgotten. Specialists can 
go so far and no further. In the camps the influ- 
enza spread with heart-breaking speed. The 
trenches had demanded their dead but the influ- 
enza was more greedy than war. Night and day 
the doctors worked to discover the cause of this 
new disease. If they could only find the cause, 
something could be done. They could fight it. 
The specialists worked as few men have worked 
before, and it is due to them that any progress 
was made. When the cause was discovered, the 
soldiers' lives and the lives of the people were 
better protected. The death lists grew snorter. 

Find the cause and you will have a chance to 
overcome anything that is bothering you, whether 
in the home or at work or anywhere else. 

Now the healing of the body is easier by far 
than the healing of the soul. You will remember 
the paralyzed man whom Our Lord cured. First 
the soul was cured. "Thy sins are forgiven thee." 
Then, when the Pharisees cried out that Our 
Lord was blaspheming in arrogating to Himself 
this supreme power of remitting sins, Christ 
proved that it was easier to cure the body than 
it was to cure the soul. "Whether is it easier to 
say, 'Thy sins are forgiven thee'; or to say, 'Arise 
and walk'? Bat that you may know that the Son 
of Man has power on earth to forgive sins," then 
He said to the paralytic : "Arise, take up thy bed 
and go into thy house" 

Our Lord cured the man's body to prove to the 
doubting Jews that the man's soul was cured, that 
his sins had really been wiped away as easily and 



i 4 6 THE HOME WORLD 

as thoroughly as the paralysis. His soul arose 
that day and walked with the innocent and the 
pure. His body rose and walked into a mere 
human habitation. There is the difference here 
that one may notice in an orchestra; the second 
parts, when heard alone are absurd. But listen 
to the first violins and the flutes and the cornets 
either alone or with the seconds. Surely, the poor 
man's body was the second part of him, and if 
he had gone away into his house with a sprightly 
body and a lame soul, there never could have been 
any melody in the halls of Heaven, for you will 
notice that Christ proclaimed before the world 
that the man had sinned, "Thy sins are forgiven 
thee.'\ 

Christ has handed down to His priests the same 
power that He Himself exercised on the para- 
lytic's soul. The priest is the doctor of the soul. 
There is a need for him in your home just as 
oftentimes there is need for the doctor. There 
is no power like his. And God has given it to 
him for He said: "Whose sins you shall forgive, 
they are forgiven them." As His Church is to 
last until the end of time, this power must also 
last; otherwise it were foolishly given and that 
would be blasphemy. 

But to cure the soul, the specialist must first 
get to the cause of the disease. What is it? What 
causes the sickness of the soul? What is it that, 
if not wiped away, if not operated on, will send 
the soul into no earthly grave but into a hell 
whence there is no redemption? . We want our 
souls cleaned and cured. What is the disease? 

When you go to a specialist, you must explain 
your symptoms. He asks you all kinds of per- 



CONSULTING THE SPECIALIST 147 

sonal questions and you never hesitate to answer. 
The doctor, you know, does not ask out of curi- 
osity or to tell his neighbors. You respect the fact 
that what you tell him will be kept a professional 
secret. How long would a doctor have patients 
if he left his consulting office, rushed out on the 
street, called to some passer-by — 

"I say! Come over here! I've just heard 
something good about Mr. Jones. And as for 
Mrs. Smith, why, you never knew what sort of 
woman she was. This is what she told me, etc., 
etc." 

Such a man would be run out of town and that 
would be too good for him. You know well that 
if you do not tell your symptoms, the doctor will 
not be able to find the cause of the disease. He 
will not be able to cure you. 

The priest is the specialist of the soul. Your 
body's health depends on your frankness with the 
doctor. Your soul's health depends on your sim- 
plicity and openness with the priest, and the great 
and only cause of the sickness of the soul is sin, 
and therefore all sins must be told to the priest in 
order that 'he might cut them from your souls. 
What causes the most horrible scruples of con- 
science if not this, that you fear you may not have 
told the priest everything and so you fear you may 
not have been thoroughly cured and made healthy 
in God's sight. 

Your secrets go into the grave with the priest. 
No ear will ever hear from his lips what you 
tell him. He has no wife to be his confidante; 
no children to be cause of care and jealousy. He 
has given himself to you and for you and his 
work ends with his life. Ask any Jesuit why he 



i 4 8 THE HOME WORLD 

studied for fifteen years before being ordained, 
and then why he waited and studied and planned 
for two years more before he was even sent out 
into any parish work of any account, and he will 
smile and say : 

"Well, you see, I'm training to be a specialist 
and I can't know too much." 

Confession is never easy, but we must obey 
God and confess. Neither is telling your secrets 
to the doctor easy, but if you want the toothache 
cured you must let the dentist grind away until 
the cavity is clear and the cause laid bare. 

There is a man who lives a very holy life. He 
is a priest, a learned man, a wonderful confessor 
and adviser. Some one said to him: 

"Father, I can never get used to going to Con- 
fession. I hate it!" 

And the holy man answered : 

"So do I. But we both know that Confession 
is the channel of the grace of God. I'd do almost 
anything to get God's grace. Wouldn't you?" 

Each soul has its own disease. Perhaps it is 
some secret sin that has gotten a grip on the soul's 
health and is strangling it. It may soon carry 
you into the grave of hell. Why should you fear 
to come to the priest? His is the greatest power 
in the world. You are foolish to neglect it; for 
if you are foul with sin, you are surely dying and 
for you there is no hope. Don't think that the 
priest remembers you or your sins. He is like 
the doctor in this, too. For how many Confes- 
sions do you think a single priest in a large parish 
hears in a single day? Perhaps as many as three 
hundred on the eve of a Feast or even on a Satur- 
day or before the first Friday. And if the doctor 



CONSULTING THE SPECIALIST 149 

must consult his card catalogue to recall your dis- 
ease, it is safe to say that the priest does not 
remember as much as the doctor. But this motive 
is low, you say. It is. But it is also human, and 
a short reflection will always show the weakness 
of human hesitation in this matter of Confession. 
God's remedy is awaiting you and the priest is 
the specialist to apply it. If you go frequently 
to the priest, your soul will be healthy and will 
arise and walk into the halls of Heaven. A 
healthy soul is sure guarantee of a happy home, 
and never forget that the priest is the soul-spe- 
cialist just as the doctor is the specialist in matters 
of the body. Consult both doctors frequently. 



CHAPTER XIII 

MORAL COURAGE IN THE HOME 

SINCE the war ended, one hears fine tales of 
the courage of our boys in the trenches. After 
all, the vast body of American troops was hur- 
riedly recruited, scantily trained, and then rushed 
across the seas to take their equal share in the 
tornado of war, already grown with the growth 
of four fearful years. No one suspected that 
they would be afraid. Our traditions and char- 
acter were against such a thing. But that they 
should show a bravery equal to that of the best 
troops of Europe made us all proud. 

When you take a factory-hand from his bench 
and send him into the battle line, you must know 
your man and his character. The white-faced 
clerk of the department store, the bank-clerk, and 
the school-teacher, and the useless fellow who 
lounges around the corners, pass us, all unno- 
ticed in peace times. Yet these were the men who 
went to France and fought with unparalleled 
courage. 

A Chaplain said: "It's a mistake to suppose 
that there was any romance, or dime-novel manner, 
about the way our boys fought. Was there a 
hill to be taken? Good. The Lieutenant 
crouched there in the brush and surrounded by 
his platoon, simply said : 'Let's go, boys !' And no 

150 



MORAL COURAGE 151 

matter how many machine-guns popped viciously 
from trees, rocks and embankments; no matter 
how many Prussian Guards stood massed in the 
way, the hill was taken." 

"Let's go, boys!" And with these words the 
factory-hand's courage was put to the test. The 
clerk and the school-teacher and the idler of the 
corner, gritted their teeth till white knobs showed 
at the jaws. And they went. Training or no 
training, bad training or regular-army training, 
they went, and we know how far they went, how 
hard it was to go at all, and through what dense 
masses of bluish-gray steel, stifling gas, and hiss- 
ing shells, they went to victory. 

Now here are two instances of courage, one of 
which has no parallel in our daily home-life, while 
the other is forever in demand, and illustrates bet- 
ter than a long discourse what kind of bravery is 
necessary in the home-world. 

There's a story of a young man in the balloon 
corps. Some have said that ballooning was com- 
paratively easy. It was safer than aeroplaning, 
perhaps, but there were many dangers we know 
not of. For instance. This young man went 
aloft every day with four companions and the 
Lieutenant. They were practicing how to jump 
from the basket in order to escape under enemy 
fire. The parachute was the slender thread that 
supported them in the swift journey from the 
clouds to the ground. Their lives depended on 
the opening of the parachute. One day the Lieu- 
tenant had ascended to about a thousand feet. 

"Now, boys, let's try the drop. You first, 
Pete." 

So Pete, his parachute already adjusted, climbed 



152 THE HOME WORLD 

over the edge of the basket, hung on for a moment, 
and let go. The others craned their necks and 
watched Pete go flying through the air. After 
the first hundred feet, the parachute had not 
opened. That was usual and no one wondered. 
But after the second hundred feet, the parachute 
was still folded. This was usual, too, in a degree. 
But they watched and watched and went sick at 
the stomach. With a speed and force enough to 
break through half a foot of asphalt pavement, 
Pete shot to the ground. The parachute had 
stubbornly refused to open. Those who watched 
from the balloon-basket shuddered. 

"A bad parachute, boys ! Too bad! Next!" 

The hesitation was slight but noticeable. Na- 
tural enough. Then the second pupil, his para- 
chute adjusted, climbed over the edge and dropped. 
Johnny, they used to call him and every one loved 
him for his smile and good nature. Johnny's para- 
chute never opened, and one of the boys in the 
balloon fainted. The Lieutenant was severely 
shocked but could not show it. These boys had 
to be trained. So he tried the next parachute 
on a bag of sand and the bag landed safely. A 
breath of relief from instructor and pupils. 

"I guess it's all right now," said the Lieuten- 
ant. /'Next!" 

This man sailed swiftly and safely to the 
ground. Now the boy who had fainted was next. 

"Want to go?" asked the Lieutenant kindly. 
"You're sick, Jim, and we can let it go at that, 
if you say so." 

"I'm sick, all right," said Jim; "but if you say 
so, I'll go." 

"Well, let's see. Two didn't open and two 



MORAL COURAGE 153 

did. You're the fifth and things may break either 
way. But I've got to carry out orders. What 
shall I do?" 

u Say the word," said Jim, and the Lieutenant 
did. 

But Jim was so weak that he had to be helped 
over the edge of the basket and when he dropped, 
the Lieutenant, being alone in the car and not 
having any pupils to edify, turned away and re- 
fused to look. When the balloon descended, he 
saw a small group surrounding a badly crumpled 
object, stretched out flat on the grass. 

"Three didn't open," he said, and felt the sob 
stick in his throat. 

He was wrong. Jim had landed safely, but on 
the way down he had managed to faint three or 
four times. 

"Were you afraid?" I asked him later on. 

He looked at me in amazement. "Father, I was 
never so afraid in my life, as when I sat there 
on the edge of that basket." 

And I walked away realizing that this man, 
simply because he was so very much afraid, was 
for that reason all the more brave, when he did 
his duty. I felt proud of Jim. 

Now comes the story of a higher kind of cour- 
age, that kind which the home is always demand- 
ing. 

American courage did not stop with mere phys- 
ical achievement. One Sergeant told me how most 
of his regiment went to Confession on the eve of 
battle. It happened in a small French village close 
to the St. Mihiel sector. The regiment had been 
making forced night-marches, and the men were 
tired. The heavy packs were so much lead on 



154 THE HOME WORLD 

their shoulders ; they were half-starved and poorly 
rested and the pay-wagon and kitchens had been 
lost in the mud and rain and winding ruts called 
roads. So when the regiment halted in the vil- 
lage, the men simply removed their tin hats, 
planked them down in the mud, sat on them and 
went to sleep. 

The sergeant had noticed a convent on the hill 
and he saw a chance to get Confession. He 
climbed the hill, tired and fagged though he was, 
found a nun who could speak English and ex- 
plained what he wanted. There was no priest 
there. She would send to the other village for the 
old Cure, but he could not speak English. So 
while the Cure hurried to the convent, the nun 
searched for a certain Confession card, very old 
and seldom used up to this time. She found it at 
last and showed the Sergeant how he was to make 
his Confession in English to the priest, who spoke 
nothing but French. 

"You take the card, point out in English what 
you have done and the Cure reads the French. 
Over here you point out the number of times." 

This was simple but did not appeal to the Ser- 
geant. Yet he was brave, and so kneeling down 
he made his Confession with his finger, as he said. 

Going back down the hill, he grinned as he 
thought of his cronies going to Confession that 
way. No one would have the courage. But he 
harangued several groups. 

"Boys, we're only a few miles from the front 
lines and we may not have another chance. 
There's a priest up there on the hill waiting for 
you. I told him you'd all be there. And it's the 
easiest thing you ever did. You don't have to say 



MORAL COURAGE 155 

a word. You just point out things with your 
.finger." 

So, half-curious and very serious-minded, for 
death was near enough to many of them, 
they went up the hill in groups, and sur- 
rounded the Cure, while the Sergeant and the 
nun explained the method. One old soldier 
shook his head. 

"It's a deaf-and-dumb Confession," he said. 

"It's too public for me," said another. "Why, 
all you fellows would know what I was pointing 
out, wouldn't you?" 

"We wouldn't look," said the Sergeant, "and 
besides we know what you ought to point out any- 
how." 

"Why did Baker give us a Lutheran Chaplain?" 
groaned another. 

Now just when one group was bolting, the Ser- 
geant saw the Major coming up the hill and was 
afraid for a moment that trouble was brewing. 
But the officer had heard that there was a chance 
to go to Confession and wanted to take advantage 
of it. Every one knew that the Major was a brave 
man, but the Sergeant thought that his commander 
might not like to go to Confession in this public 
manner. The Sergeant was wrong. The Major 
had used the card before and kneeling down with 
great simplicity, before the eyes of almost all his 
men, he made his Confession. And when he went 
away, he left a long line of tired and determined 
soldiers waiting before the old French Cure to 
make their Confessions with their fingers. 

A few days later, more than half the regiment 
was killed. The Major, too. But the Sergeant 
thought that while all had been brave in that 



156 THE HOME WORLD 

awful half hour in the woods, the Major was brav- 
est when he went to Confession on the hill. 

It is the old, old story. One act of physical 
courage is superb. No one can doubt that. The 
blood warms and leaps within us when we hear 
of the deed. But while we do not thrill so much 
at moral courage, we know that it requires a bigger 
and finer soul. 

Now the factory-hand and the clerks and the 
teachers and the corner idlers have returned from 
the battles to civil life. All are lean, sturdy, 
brown and unafraid. They are now in the home- 
world again. Can't you see that in civil life, in 
the home, there are more occasions for the prac- 
tice of moral courage, than there was for the 
practice of physical courage in the war days? 



CHAPTER XIV 
THE BANE OF THE HOME WORLD 

THE age is really one of superficiality. We 
look no deeper than the face of things. Men 
are hidden from us and great depths do not appeal. 
The excuse we offer for this contentment with sur- 
face nothings is the hurry of the age. "Today," 
we explain learnedly, "is different from the past. 
This is an age of money-making, of progress in 
material things, and utility is the watchword." 

Now second thought shows us that we are de- 
ceiving ourselves. Indeed, we ought to see at 
once that veneering is not a useful thing to cover 
faults, no matter how appropriate for defects in 
wood and paint and crockery and the like. Our 
excuse of hurry, too easily satisfies in our self- 
condonement, and all the time we know that hurry 
is not even a good veneer. 

There is a violent hurry in all life and in all 
times of the world. The leading motive for the 
hurry is not always the same. In St. Margaret 
Mary's day, and that is not so long ago, there 
was a hurry and bustle just as there is today, 
and in her own life there was the greatest hurry 
in attaining the ideal of her soul, selflessness. 
Here is the great contrast between her saintly life 
and ours in this hurry-up day even in the home- 
world that should be so holy; we are all hurrying 

157 



1 58 THE HOME WORLD 

towards a goal that is self, proclaimed in large 
electric-sign letters; she hurried through her few 
years of life towards the Sacred Heart of Jesus 
and the increase and spread of devotion to that 
Heart of love. 

Who today says that there is great love in the 
world either for God or our fellow men? The 
great love of the time is the love of self, and every 
great effort of the day seems to be aimed at the 
betterment of self. The gentle St. Margaret 
Mary had forgotten self long before the age of 
twenty-four, when she entered the Visitation Con- 
vent of Paray-le-Monial. During her remaining 
years, nineteen, she more and more cast self into 
the background, and in the end was absorbed in 
the Heart of love whose interests she had been 
chosen to spread. It is just in this one point 
that our day differs from hers; love of self and 
love of God. One means that God melts into the 
dimness of the picture, while the other really 
means that we efface self, not so much before the 
eyes of men, as before our own eyes. This is 
the great task we should set ourselves in trying to 
imitate the life of Margaret Mary, and if we 
are to succeed at all, we must start with the cor- 
rect view of why we are hurrying and for what 
we hurry. Selfishness is the greatest bane of the 
home. 

Now it is easy to find fault with ourselves and 
others. It is quite another matter to know how 
to correct our faults and then to have the strong 
will necessary to apply the bitterest medicine to 
the open sore. The sting will be felt and natur- 
ally we shrink from the sting. The noise and 
bustle and mad rush of the age we see when we 









BANE OF THE HOME WORLD 159 

think over the thing, but the remedy we do not 
clearly perceive until we study such a life as 
Margaret Mary's. The remedy she teaches is 
selflessness, and at once we do appreciate the appo- 
siteness of the cure. Have we the grim strong 
will to apply to the cure to the sore ? This means, 
in another way, have we the courage to set about 
forgetting ourselves and loving God above all 
things? 

The surge of labor and the reflux of capital 
interest us; the depreciation of money and the 
lavish coining of more, are important in our eyes; 
the growth of earnings and the leaps of the food- 
prices hold our attention above all things else ; the 
whole ocean of industrial life, home life, produc- 
tive and receptive life, passive and active life, 
intellectual, mercantile, diplomatic, economic and 
religious life — all seem to be under the influence 
of whimsical cross-winds and undercurrents that 
threaten the future good of the nation and the 
present good of the individual. 

So we argue, but in reality, is not the whole 
argument summed up in these words: How will 
this affect met Underneath all the ocean of life, 
underneath all the change, the one important, 
primary matter is: How will this affect me? 
There is the self sticking out prominently under 
the guise of future prosperity and present advance- 
ment. Big words and vague terms cover the one 
essential thing in the world today and that thing 
is Self. 

In Margaret Mary's day human nature was 
not very different. Self was as prominent as it 
is today, but she lived a sermon against the ten- 
dency of her day, and her saintliness brought out 



160 THE HOME WORLD 

of the skies of Heaven the Heart of the Man-God 
-filled with love for these poor selfish men, and in 
the devotion which was entrusted to her care, is 
to be found the remedy for our greediness. Love 
of the Sacred Heart is an antidote for the sick- 
ness of selfishness in the home. 

It seems altogether out of place to mention St. 
Margaret Mary in connection with this material- 
istic age, but second thought reveals in her the 
pointed contrast to the lives we lead. When she 
lay dying at the early age of forty-three, she kept 
repeating: "What have I in Heaven and what 
do I desire on earth but Thee alone, O my God!" 
And it is in these words that we perceive, as in 
a flash of light her whole life, her whole mission. 
She was absorbed in God, lived for Him and His 
Heart, and the only good things she found in life 
were good simply because they were God's or led 
her to God. The hungry desire men have for the 
mere material good things of life is so character- 
istic of us today that the future will mark us with 
that undesirable stamp, selfishness. The motive 
force dragging and impelling men is selfishness, 
and after all the toil and suffering to put self 
on the pedestal and adore it, we awake suddenly 
to the realization that we have lost the finer, purer 
comforts of life, of family contentment, of a home, 
of the old-fashioned simplicity that held God in 
the first place, self in the second and the fellow 
man in the same second place. These, finally, are 
the great necessary relations of man, to God, to 
self, to the fellow man, and last of all, to the 
things, material and intellectual, that are connected 
with life. We cannot escape these relations, and 
when the curtain is drawn at the end of life, we 



BANE OF THE HOME WORLD 161 

shall be forced to answer very definite questions 
about our responsibility in regard to them. 

That a woman who hid herself away in a Visi- 
tation convent for nineteen years should suddenly 
stand before us preaching the remedy for the 
world's present-day disease, is only one of the 
apparent contradictions God has been pleased to 
show us. The story of her short life is certainly 
a surprise for the people we meet in the street 
cars, the subways, or the railroad trains. Visions, 
revelation, terrible bodily mortifications, fast 
scourgings to blood, persecutions, contempt, re- 
vilings — what do these mean to the motorman or 
the conductor, to the banker counting his gold 
eagles, to the army officer planning how to defend 
a fort, to the man at the factory bench and the girl 
at the typewriter or the loom? What does her 
life of absorption in God mean to any one of us, 
if it is not to preach boldly the remedy for our ills : 
love of God, forgetfulness of self? 

Her mission was to propagate a devotion of 
love, the love of Christ's Sacred Heart; she was 
to show men the unrequited love of the Saviour 
for selfish man, and especially for the selfish man 
in the present day. The heart is the symbol of 
love among men, and Christ's Heart is the symbol 
of His love for men, besides being worthy of our 
adoration as part of His Sacred Body united to 
the Divine Person. Love is what the heart signi- 
fies and what the heart wants. We were born 
to be loved and to love. # When life is barren of 
love it is not worth living, and yet even in the 
most desolate moments of life there can always 
be the holiest love for the Heart of Christ, just 
as St. Margaret Mary felt this holy love inflame 



1 62 THE HOME WORLD 

her soul when the hours were darkest and her soul 
in deep distress. 

Now love is the great unknown of the day. It 
is the x in the equation which men find impossible 
of solution. Men today smile tolerantly at the 
word "love." They deny that the thing exists. 

"Love has gone out of life," they cry; "nothing 
is left but humanitarianism, which after all is only 
another and more subtle form of selfishness." 

To many, many men, life consists in the answer 
to this question: How much are you getting out 
of yourself and others and everything round about 
you? Love ! It is a word for a romance, for youth 
to brood over in the moonlight. The awakening 
comes later with the realization that the human 
heart has been fooled in chasing a filmy nothing. 

And Margaret Mary at once preaches the 
remedy. God loved us. We do not love God. 
We are wrapped up in unhappiness because we are 
wrapped up in self. God is Love. He asks for 
our love, and yearns to love us. He is grieved at 
our coldness. Your life will be happy, your home- 
world blessed, your day will be a day of joy, if 
you once discover that all life is aiming at Heaven 
and God. 

While not at once apparent, the life of St. 
Margaret Mary has a wonderful connection with 
the present age and our own homes. Her life is 
the clear light that throws into prominence our 
shortcomings, and most of all our selfishness. We 
feel a yearning for the better things, and we need 
not go far to find them all. The heart of Jesus 
Christ is the treasure-house of all happiness, and 
the price of true unhappiness, whether in our 
homes or in the great world outside the front door, 
is exclusive love of self. 



CHAPTER XV 

THE CRADLE OF CATHOLIC LEADERS 

THERE is no question of the need of Catholic 
leaders. That is taken for granted. The 
necessity for such men and women among the 
laity stares us in the face. We cannot avoid the 
issue. Nowadays organization is essential to 
success. That is certainly more true today than 
it ever was before in the history of the world. 
Everything, even Protestantism, is being systema- 
tized and the basis is usually money and the object, 
the acquirement of money. Now to have organ- 
ization of the right kind, it is absolutely necessary 
to have, first of all, leaders. The organizers are 
needed more than the organizations but, given 
one, we have the other, and we must pray for 
the training of these organizers, and help train 
them in the shelter of our homes. 

There is pressing need for the trained Catholic 
laymen in political and official life. The^ military 
and naval departments should have their gener- 
ous sprinkling of Catholic leaders. Parliamentary 
and diplomatic life is a vast field of usefulness 
for God and country. Business could be well 
salted with Catholic morals and profiteering 
stopped, and here it is that perhaps the largest 
field opens for the ordinary Catholic to lead his 
fellow business man and teach him by solid prac- 

163 



1 64 THE HOME WORLD 

tical example that healthy business cannot be 
separated from religious principles. Ask your 
physician if there is not a lamentable need of 
Catholic leaders in the medical and kindred pro- 
fessions. Is law capable of betterment by men 
trained in Catholic morality? And so it goes 
with every field of endeavor. The trained men 
of other faiths or no faith at all are looking to the 
Catholics for the right thing to do. There is the 
responsibility and the burden. Suppose that the 
training is not all it should be, and it becomes evi- 
dent at once that men will look to Catholics in 
vain for what is higher and nobler. The influence 
then of the home-world is incalculable in the for- 
mation of leaders. Home is their cradle. 

Men will follow a leader. This fact has been 
demonstrated in boyhood and there is a great 
deal of boyishness in all men. Today people stand 
in need of the man to lead them. The people look 
here and there searchingly for the Napoleon of 
the hour. No one appears who dares answer their 
questions, and the simple reason is that the train- 
ing of these so-called leaders has left them with 
the husks of an answer and that is all they have. 

A Senator who was campaigning for the Presi- 
dential nomination returned from one of his tours 
and met a colleague in the Senate corridor. A 
serious conversation followed. 

"The thing that struck me," said the Senator, 
"was the eager attitude of the people. They sit 
there in front of you, hanging on your words, 
begging you to answer their difficulties. They 
were simply holding out their hands, pleading like 
little children for some solution of the problems 
confronting this nation today. 



THE CRADLE OF LEADERS 165 

"They will follow a leader," he continued, "and 
the great pity is that the leader cannot be found." 

He might have added that when some one does 
push himself forward he lacks, frequently, the 
training in sound moral principles essential to a 
true leader. How can such a man solve the moral 
and sociological problems when he himself has 
had no real training in morals? Generally speak- 
ing, the leadership of non-Catholics is founded on 
individuality of character. The man is the law 
in many such cases. The early training cannot 
be made to answer these modern questions so ur- 
gently in need of an answer, for the early training 
has frequently been as shallow as the systems of 
philosophy and ethics taught in Protestant col- 
leges today. 

During the war, men willingly placed their lives 
in the hands of their leaders. General Pershing 
held several million lives in his palm. It was his 
word that sent a division into the roar and din of 
battle. It was his mere word that sent thousands 
to look closely into the gray bony face of death. 
Victory for the country was his sole desire. That 
had to be gained. He had been trained by the 
country to win victories and yet he loved the lives 
of his soldiers and saved them where he could. 
Victory came as the combined result of a trained 
leader and a willing army of badly trained millions. 

The formation of the National Army was hotly 
discussed at Washington. Senators and Represen- 
tatives stood on the floor of Congress and debated 
the advisability of the draft. One of the main 
reasons for opposing a vast military system was 
the lack of leaders, trained men in whom the troops 
could confide. If the Congress called to the 



1 66 THE HOME WORLD 

colors millions of young men fresh from the mild 
pursuits of civil life, and hurried them off to the 
red fields of France against a well trained, power- 
ful military machine, who would be responsible 
for their lives? Who would answer to the coun- 
try, to the mothers of these brave boys? Their 
officers, naturally. For to the officers, the leaders, 
the soldiers look for life and safety and victory 
and, if need be, death. 

But the Congress had no officers to guide four 
millions of men into battle. True, there were 
West Pointers, but these men were all too few. 
,They had been trained in the school of war and 
now that war was ravaging the world, it was their 
training only that could make millions of Ameri- 
can young men march in steady rhythm up to the 
cannon's mouth, and into thick woods festered 
with machine-gun nests. That problem of officers 
for the men was met by the officers' training 
schools. Camps were formed for intensive train- 
ing, the colleges were commandeered by the Gov- 
ernment, and on the college men of the country 
rested the hopes of the millions. It is a natural 
thing to turn to educated men when a crisis 
threatens, and it proved no exception during the 
war. 

There are twenty million Catholics in the 
country. Their leaders among the clergy are 
famous. No other body can point to such an 
array of varied, educated talent and abundant 
manly energy. The utterance of the Catholic 
Episcopate on the problems of the day and their 
solution has aroused the admiration of friend and 
foe alike. Why will you find leaders like the 
pastors and curates, the religious men and women, 



THE CRADLE OF LEADERS 167 

of the Catholic Church in this country? No 
other body can boast of such self-sacrificing lead- 
ers. These men and women have given their 
lives and their all for the sheep in the great 
Shepherd's pasture. They can do no more, and 
if you ask what influence is running like a golden 
thread through their lines, you will discover that 
they were all nursed in leadership at their mothers' 
breasts. Their homes made them leaders. 

It is then to the Catholic laity that the Church 
looks for the sturdy men and prudent modest 
women, to lead the great mass of Catholics in the 
way they should walk. And not Catholics alone ! 
A Catholic leader cannot but influence all those 
around him. And this should be remembered. 
The path to be walked is not always or not solely 
the path to church. That path is pointed out in 
great measure by the clergy and the nuns and the 
parents. The path that needs the sign-post most 
is the wide path of every-day life whereon it is 
well nigh impossible for the priest and nun to 
walk. There is a road to the White House, to 
the National Senate, to the State Legislatures, to 
the Municipal Courts and Governments. Here is 
a field for leaders, well walked already but with 
plenty of room for the trained man. 

There is a David Ignatius Walsh of Massa- 
chusetts, who can stand on the floor of the United 
States Senate and speak thrillingly of the prob- 
lems of the day and, what is more, present a 
solution for them that has been founded on Catho- 
lic ethics. We need not go far in our own dis- 
tricts to find men and women who are forging 
ahead for the one reason that they can stand up 
ibefore their fellows and say: 



1 68 THE HOME WORLD 

"This is your problem. This is the only sane 
answer to it. I have been trained to see that 
problem and to meet it with this answer, and, if 
I am to be your leader, I shall see to it that 
laws are passed embodying the principles I now 
present to you." 

And what are these principles? Catholic ethics 
and the whole system of Catholic philosophy. 
These are the weapons of a trained Catholic 
leader, and you can do no better thing for the 
training of Catholic leaders than to send your boy 
or girl to Catholic schools and colleges where 
these principles are taught. By doing that you 
are training leaders in the right Catholic founda- 
tions of Christian life and morality. That is what 
the Catholic school is for, to train leaders, and 
just as the world war demonstrated the depen- 
dence of the masses on educated men, so the 
after-war life will demonstrate the absolute de- 
pendence of the entire country on the solutions 
of Catholic leaders. There will be no sane end- 
ing of perplexities without these principles and 
these trained men. 

Some Catholics are diffident in assuming lead- 
ership. Diffidence here is vitally bad. No leader 
ever gets a sounder training than the Catholic 
student. If men and women are crying aloud for 
leaders, if Catholics hold the only sensible answer 
to the modern difficulties, why should Catholics 
hesitate to take hold of the reins, why should 
Catholics hesitate to train the future generations 
for just this kind of leadership? 

Now arrogance is a besetting sin of leaders, and 
in praying for Catholic leaders and their training, 
ask the Sacred Heart to make them learned and 



THE CRADLE OF LEADERS 169 

prudent and brave, yes, but also humble with 
the great humility of our leader Christ, who 
could die on a cross to lead men to Heaven. And 
after all, is Catholic leadership for the honor of 
the man or for God? 

With the authority of leadership comes respon- 
sibility. Obligation is the essential effect of law, 
and obligation is founded ultimately on the will 
of God. If, then, you train your boy and girl 
for Catholic leadership, be sure you pray that 
they be well conformed to the will of God, in suc- 
cess as well as in failure. 

And with all the responsibility, there is a won- 
derful satisfaction in guiding your fellow man. 
Your work may be anywhere, in factory, or store 
or office, but you can be a Catholic leader in your 
life and feel this satisfaction. Sweet will be the 
bread of those who lead men to God. It is too 
true that life speaks louder than words, and the 
great popularity of Catholic leaders is due to the 
sanctity and simplicity of their lives. 

There is an old man in France and his name is 
written in imperishable history. Foch, the "gray 
man of Christ," is a leader of men, a trained 
Catholic leader, and today with all his fame as a 
mighty military genius, it is his simplicity of life, 
his humility before his God, that speaks to the 
world more shrilly that the brazen trumpet ac- 
claims him. 

The great Marshal, in a speech delivered at 
Georgetown University, on November 16, 1921, 
said this: 

"In 1 87 1 I left the Jesuit College of St. 
Clement's at Metz to pursue a military career, 
and now as my life nears to its close I again find 



1 7 o THE HOME WORLD 

myself within the walls of an old Jesuit College. 
I can no longer salute the Reverend Fathers of 
my youth, but I am happy for this opportunity 
to salute their worthy successors. 

"I attribute the successes of my life to the two 
great principles taught me in those days: The 
Love of God and the Love of Country. We 
cannot have everything in life as we would have 
it, but we can at least remain true to the princi- 
ples of God and of truth; and if we do this, no 
matter what troubles rage around us, all will be 
well." 

The same is true of our own great leaders, like 
Admiral Benson, Senators Ransdall, Ashurst and 
Walsh, and the lamented Chief Justice, Edward 
Douglas White, whose life was a blessing to the 
nation, and many, many others whose success and 
fame have not built a barred door between them- 
selves and God or their fellow man. 

Charity begins at home. Your leadership 
should not begin anywhere else. And inside your 
home is your heart, and if there is pulsing in the 
blood of your heart, the real love for Christ, you 
will train your heart first of all to lead itself by 
the divine Model. The heart, the home, the 
parish, the country, all depend on the Heart of 
Christ. 



CHAPTER XVI 
WORK 

WORK has been defined as the serious occupa- 
tion of the human race, and as such, it is 
worth a short consideration. 

Roughly divided, work is mental and physical. 
Mental toil is had when the mind is most of all 
occupied, as in study or meditating, unraveling 
the tangled threads of political problems; pre- 
paring an examination, or bending the stubborn 
waywardness of the mind to think on God in 
prayer. 

Now the man who mends pavements or fires the 
boilers of the locomotive is engaging his bodily 
energies; and seriously, too, for the work itself 
is important, strenuous surely, and the money 
which is its partial reward, buys the bread for the 
children, pays the rent, and binds his little home- 
world together. Work keeps the proverbial wolf 
away from the front door. 

Toil, though imposed as the penance for sin, 
has become the solace for woes, and what Lowell 
says is true, that: 

No man is born into this world whose work 
Is not born with him. 

The two are inseparable, man and toil, and 
many times, I think, in our lives have we thanked 



1 72 THE HOME WORLD 

God for the grace of toiling when the clouds of 
sorrow scowled threateningly. 

Toil whether mental or physical, is the sad for- 
tune of man. He cannot escape it. He may com- 
plain naively like Charles Lamb and say that a 
"Sabbathless Satan" invented work, but the say- 
ing is false. 

Who first invented work, and bound the free 
And holiday-rejoicing spirit down 



To that dry-drudgery at the desk's dead wood? 
Sabbathless Satan! 

"Why do we all labor?" asks St. Augustine. 
And he gives the reason that u we are all mortal 
men, weak and infirm, carrying earthen vessels, 
with which our fellow men come into painful col- 
lision." 1 

"The labor we delight in physics pain," said 
Shakespeare, and the truth lies here. Many a man 
consoled his heart by slaving with his hands; and 
often has the mother's bosom yearned less eagerly 
for the lost babe because her hands were wet with 
soap-suds. 

Toil is our lot. Even before Adam sinned, man 
was commanded to toil. In the description of cre- 
ation we read this: "And the Lord took man 
and put him into the paradise of pleasure to dress 
it and keep it." 3 

Hence the toil was born with man but not, of 
course, toil in bitter sweat of the brow and repug- 
nant to the guiding will of Adam. The care of 
paradise was to be a pleasant work in the literal 

l Sermon lix. 'Gen. ii. 



WORK 173 

sense of those words, and not a penance as work 
afterwards became. 

So it is today even, for many occupations that 
appear toilsome are really recreations for those 
engaged in them. Vacation is not idle staring at 
the sun, or watching the clouds swing along the 
skies, or waves ripple along the white sandy beach. 
Many men get their best rest by a change of work. 
; Thus it has been known that a very good banker 
found his joy in writing fine criticisms of literary 
works; and cutting down huge trees is nowadays 
the recreation of a former Emperor, as it once 
was the whetstone whereon Gladstone sharpened 
his wits. The point of view is interesting in this 
matter of work. Men hasten to the country for 
vacation time. They want to run the farm. The 
farmer cannot understand how a city man will pay 
money to be allowed to milk the cows or pitch 
hay. 

Again how strange it is to hear a laborer com- 
miserating with a scholar on the dreadful books 
he has to read ! How strange to hear a plumber 
remark that he preferred his work to the profes- 
sor's. When the salesman said: "I can sell that 
poor fellow anything. He's a scholar," — he did 
not utter a universal truth, but the reason added 
that "he'll buy to get rid of me," is illuminating, 
for it has been generally said that scholars are 
no good in business. Mind-toil, it would seem, 
gathers misty clouds about the thinker's head; he 
has no time, no inclination, no judgment often 
enough, to answer the noisy salesman who is cry- 
ing the worth of potatoes and cabbage ; pork and 
beans; hats and trousers; shoes and neckties. All 
these mundane affairs are weighted heavily with 



i 74 THE HOME WORLD 

their own commonplace stupidity and usefulness, 
and so will never soar into the scholar's fog-world 
of the mind. 

But the mental toiler balances the hand toiler. 
To say that work is done only by the hands and 
machinery is a sad error. There was a brain back 
of the machine and probably the brain moulded 
the machinery only after hours and hours of 
patiently watching human hands in their puny 
creative efforts. After all, is not the machine that 
bursts forth triumphantly from the inventor's 
brain, only a series of human hands working 
rapidly together and multiplied? Man-made 
machinery is only an imitation of the machinery 
God first made. 

Brain-toil is real toil and harder than mere 
bodily toil. Both are necessary. The marvel is 
that brain-workers feel their exhaustion keenly 
and sigh for manual labor, while the opposite is 
far from true. The laborer may envy the brain- 
worker his white collar and cuffs, his clean clothes 
and well-groomed appearance, but how few there 
are among the laborers who ever desire brain- 
work, toil with books, with typewriters and pens, 
with all those things attached to the white-collar 
man as his weapons and his uniform? 

Work is necessary, for eating depends on it. St. 
Paul told the Thessalonians: "Neither did we 
eat any man's bread for nothing, but in labor and 
in toil we worked night and day, lest we should 
be chargeable to any of you. Not as if we had 
not power; but that we might give ourselves a 
pattern unto you to imitate us. For also when 
we were with you, this we declared to you; that 
if any man will not work, neither let him eat. For 



WORK 175 

we have heard that there are some among you 
who have walked disorderly, working not at all, 
but curiously meddling. Now we charge them 
that are such, and beseech them by the Lord 
Jesus Christ, that working, they would eat their 
own bread." 3 

The father of the family must furnish forth 
food for his household. His work is needed not 
only for his own happiness but for the happiness 
of all in the house. The saving, thrifty, industri- 
ous father, and the wise, careful mother, who 
makes her husband's salary go as far as possible, 
form the ideal basis for the happy home-world. 
By his thrift and industry the father stores the 
harvest and the days of his gray hair will be 
days of peace and plenty. It is a wise man who 
has visions of the harvest but wiser far is he who 
allows not the burning heats of summer to deter 
him from toil. The harvest of autumn never 
grows from the laziness of summer. "The things 
that thou hast not gathered in thy youth, how 
shalt thou find them in thy old age?" asks the 
Scripture, 4 and St. Cyprian expands this idea. 
"As the fruit is not found on the tree on which 
the flower has not first appeared, so he who does 
not prepare the harvest in his youth by toiling, 
will not gather it in his old age." 

Hence work is necessary for our sustenance, 
and that our children may not leave the dinner 
table hungry. Can you imagine any more miser- 
able heart than the mother's as she sees the thin 
cheek of her child grow thinner; the blood grow 
paler; the muscles thin; the eyes round and bril- 
liant with the longing for a piece of bread? No 

»II Thess. iii, 8-11. *Ecelus. xxv, 6. 



176 THE HOME WORLD 

father can regret the sweat of his labor when he 
sees his children satisfying themselves with the 
food he has won by toil. "Man is born to labor 
and the bird to fly," 5 said the false comforter of 
Job, and as the bird would belie its nature by 
not flying so the man is no real man who does 
not work. 

For sluggard's brow the laurel never grows, 
Renown is not the child of indolent repose. 6 

Now it is not so much what our work is that 
matters. We may spend our days peering into 
watches or engines; making socks or books; wash- 
ing gold or clothes — it makes not a whit of differ- 
ence. The banker locked away in the room where 
he perfects his schemes for cornering the market; 
the colored boy who shines the brass on the door- 
knobs ; the clerk wrinkling his brows over columns 
of figures; the scrub-woman laden with bucket and 
mop — all are working, and the only thing that 
really counts is the intention with which they work. 
If the scrub-woman scrubs for God and the banker 
invests money for the devil, the scrub-woman is 
better off than the banker. Or if the negro boy 
is struggling to buy his home and save for the 
rainy day of sickness and the banker is working 
merely to gather more money, then the boy is a 
better workman and a greater reward is promised 
him. 

Our toil is worthless if we eliminate God from 
jt, and we should never work until we have asked 
the question: "Just why am I working?" 

Remember that honest toil such as this is the 
devil's defeat, and the old advice that when the 

•Thomson. B Job v. 7. 



WORK 177 

devil comes, let him find you working, is more 
true today than ever. Idleness is the root of evil, 
the devil's paradise. If he can keep man from 
toil, he will busy him with sin, and a short-hour 
day is not always a help to heaven. 

We have fine examples to urge us on cheerfully 
in our work. Christ during His life on earth, 
labored at a carpenter's bench for the bread His 
Blessed Mother ate. Later on He taught the 
twelve fisherman for three years, and that class 
was anything but bright and intelligent. How the 
Mother of God worked at Nazareth? She did 
not fear,to put her hands into the wash-tub, or into 
the dish-pan, and even if modern girls will call 
such labor beneath them, it was not disdained by 
the Blessed Virgin. She had no hired servants to 
do the lowly offices of the house and it is start- 
ling to think of Our Lord paying the bills of that 
home by labor with hammer and saw and chisel. 
Any man with such an example before him will 
never think that work was invented by Sabbathless 
Satan and that it has no honest place in our lives. 
St. Joseph, while he lived, worked at his trade 
and bought bread for the Child and Its Mother. 
Was ever labor more richly rewarded than that 
of Joseph? 

Later on, after Our Lord's Ascension, the 
Blessed Mother surely did not sit around the 
home of St. John and do nothing. It must have 
been her example that inspired the Apostles and 
early Christians with that zeal and energy which 
built up the infant Church so rapidly and so well. 
We read of St. Paul boasting that he ate no man's 
bread but his own which he earned as a tent- 
maker, and in modern days we have but to look at 



178 THE HOME WORLD 

the labors of Xavier to be convinced that all great 
men worked, either with brain or hand, or both. 

Now you may suffer disappointment in your toil. 
Like flowers that fade and dry up and droop in 
the heat of the summer sun because they have not 
been nourished with cooling waters, you may find 
the results of your labors small and insignificant. 
You may be like the Apostles, who labored all 
night and caught nothing. But remember that at 
the bidding of Christ, they persevered and their 
nets could not hold the catch. If they had become 
discouraged and gone off in disgust, their nets 
would have remained empty. The rose is plucked 
from the bush at the risk of getting a thorn thrust 
into your finger, and the results of labor are ob- 
tained only after much toil and worry and disap- 
pointments. Perseverance, doggedness, win the 
prize. 

Again it is well to remember that the beginning 
is not so much to be praised as the crown of the 
work. He who sows the seed has only started 
to work. The joy of all toil is in its purpose, not 
in its material rewards, and the crop is in the toil 
and the seed both. Pray God for a good begin- 
ning; offer Him the toil itself, and when you have 
finished and the harvest is yours, tell God that He 
gave the increase and you did nothing but place 
His life-giving seed in the earth. Labor is the 
salvation of many men, and when you labor for a 
home, you have pleasant toil such as Adam had 
in taking care of Paradise. 



CHAPTER XVII 

AFTER YOUR VACATION 

NOW that you have again taken up the bur- 
den of your work, cast a glance back at the 
good time you had on vacation. Then, if you are 
courageous enough, look bravely into the eyes of 
the coming year. Come up on a mountain peak. 
There to the right are the fair fields of the coun- 
try, the rivers, the brooks, the hills and moun- 
tains, and afar in the distance the wonderful sea. 
That was your vacation ground. You had a good 
time there. You hated to leave those toys of the 
human race in summer time. 

But now turn to the left and look down from 
the mountain peak again. You see a number of 
small hills, rising one on the other, and in the 
distance a large lump of mountain. The achieve- 
ment of the coming year for you will be to climb 
each small hill, one after the other, until you 
reach the large lump. Then, if you climb that, 
you have done your work well and deserved an- 
other vacation. Then you may come down from 
the mountain and choose your playground. 

You were wise, I hope. You played hard when 
you had the chance just as you work hard now. 
The reason for playing was the rest you obtained, 
the new elasticity acquired by your body and mind, 
the freshness of spirit apparent in your clear 

179 



i8o THE HOME WORLD 

steady eyes and in the flush of your cheeks when 
the breezes of mountain or seashore blew the cob- 
webs from your brain. No one can doubt but that 
a year of earnest work does weave cobwebs in the 
head, and to rid yourself of these is to win the 
reward of playing hard. Elasticity, lightness, 
alertness, a quick reflex between ideas and actions, 
these you obtained from the money spent on your- 
self last summer. 

During the coming year you will work as hard 
as you played, and your pay will be the money 
necessary for you and yours to live. Pay for work 
is one of the very pleasant things in life. The 
sense of achieving twenty, thirty, fifty or a hun- 
dred dollars a week for a week's faithful work 
has its legitimate expression in the smiling face, 
the sparkling eye and the springy step. You 
achieve when you work hard. 

There is also real achievement when you play 
hard. There is betterment of the body, and con- 
sequent lightening of the mind and the eagerness 
for deeds again. It is the relation of cause and 
effect. The body weighs down the mind. When 
the body is put in splendid physical condition, the 
mind responds. Views of life change, and lips 
that seemed as if they could never loosen into a 
smile, now lift wide and high in hearty laughter. 

This is really the story of life : work, rest, work. 
The rest includes enjoyment, not only outside the 
work we have done, but in the work itself. We 
do something, finish it, contemplate it, and sing a 
little song to ourselves when we find the work 
worth while. We are good pupils when we do 
this, for God taught us the method. He worked 
and looked at His work and saw that it was good, 



AFTER YOUR VACATION 181 

and rested. He achieved a world, was pleased 
with it, since it was an image of His perfection, 
and rested. We cannot work well without making 
the work an image of ourselves. The thing we 
effect is only an image of the form in our minds. 
What is good we admire. We cannot help it, 
though it may not be permitted to talk out loud 
about our greatness. But there is this difference 
between the Great Worker, God, and man : God 
never loses interest in His work. From the first 
days of the world to the present day and through 
the vistas of the future, He conserves His work 
in that same perfection which He intended for it. 
We lose interest, not so much because we want 
to, but because we are weak and pitiful even in 
our greatest achievement. If we could make a 
blade of grass, we would not lose interest in it. 

When, therefore, God sees us taking a few days 
off in the summer, He understands that we are 
imitating Him and He approves, if (and this is 
a very big if) we do not lose His friendship be- 
cause we went on a vacation. To lose God by 
taking a rest from our work is certainly no way 
of imitating Him, and may there be no conscious- 
ness in your hearts, as you look back on the days 
of the summer ! If there is such a consciousness, 
you know clearly from the pain of experience that 
you robbed yourself of all summer delights when 
you robbed yourself of God. 

Half measures in work or play are not worth 
while. Work with all your might and play with 
all your might. The difficulty seems to be that 
we want to play always. We would willingly dis- 
prove what Shakespeare says about all holidays 
being no holidays. 



1 82 THE HOME WORLD 

If all the year were playing holidays 

To sport would be as tedious as to work. 

But when they seldom come, they wished for come. 

And we would rather quote the poet against him- 
self in the following: 

Present mirth hath present laughter, 
What's to come is still unsure. 

Would it have been better to save the money 
by staying home, moping and adding avoirdupois 
to your humor? Would it have been better to 
save the money at the expense of your health and 
the slowing down of the whole bodily machine? 
Would it have been advisable to save fifty dollars 
and present a grouchy frown to all beholders for 
the coming year? 

These alternatives are not attractive. The cost 
and the pay were balanced, if you played hard, 
and — remember this — if you did not lose God on 
the trip up the river to His mountains, or to His 
seashore, or to His open country. If you lost 
God, even for a day, even for a moment by one 
action, you would better have stayed at work and 
attained the grouch. To put the soul into a dirty 
mud-bath is not the purpose of the summer vaca- 
tion. A sand-rub is a painful thing for the body, 
but a sin-rub stuns the immortal soul, and it were 
better to let the champion prize-fighter pound you 
into a mass of bleeding humanity than to pound 
your soul into disease and death, when you were 
on vacation. That's true! No vacation for the 
body is ever worth the destruction of the soul. 
And you know the dangers of vacation. People 
seem to think that the summer is the proper time 



AFTER YOUR VACATION 183 

to return to primitive savagery and throw a blotch 
on the beautiful screen of God's summer-time. 
Isn't it a fact that many try to approach the un- 
civilized barbarian of the South Seas or inland 
Africa by their manners and dress? 

The railroad stations in vacation time were 
like huge department stores on a grand bargain 
day. Women of all sizes (pardon I), colors 
(pardon!), races, degrees of heat and vexation, 
rushed hither and yon laden with all varieties of 
suit-cases, bags, umbrellas, parasols and hat-boxes. 
The men (just as bad but not showing it so 
plainly!) sauntered or ran, smoked their cigarettes 
and cigars, toted expensive golf-bags tennis rac- 
quets, fishing poles and bags, and tried to look 
indifferent to their white ducks or Palm Beach or 
mohair suits. It was a group of men of all sorts 
rushing like schoolboys for a holiday; close- 
shaved, ruddy, brisk, eyes alight with the prospect 
of woods, rivers, and the sea — the sea ! The sta- 
tions formed a grand moving picture in colorful 
action, and the character-observer found all types 
present in the throng and he found most of them 
good. 

Then later on at the hotels of the resorts you met 
the same crowds and the same types. You could 
not tell the employer from the employee, the mil- 
lionaire from his clerk, the society lady from the 
maid who takes care of her dog. Good clothes 
and the grand air prevailed among all classes. 
Indeed, there were no classes, just Americans out 
for the holidays. One class, though, you could 
always detect, because the eye cannot help seeing 
colors. That is what forces the eye to see, and 
the girls who believed that facial beauty comes 



1 84 THE HOME WORLD 

in glass jars and boxes and lip-sticks and eye- 
stainers, certainly forced the eye to see them. 
Your pity for their ignorance gave credit to your 
good taste and intelligence, for the poor misguided 
girls took away from the buoyancy of the summer 
scene. These girls might have been the devil's 
gold-bricks, but let us hope, unconsciously. 

We will not mention mosquito bites, lightning 
bugs and gnats; katy-dids and katy-didn'ts all 
night long; we will not mention the mournful cow- 
bell that refused to allow sleep to knit up the 
raveled sleeve of care ; we will not mention the 
dread of threatening clouds that would have de- 
stroyed the parasol made only to heighten your 
complexion ; we will not mention the various shades 
of sunburn, brilliant reds, pinks, light and dark 
browns, to be followed later on by pleasant blis- 
ters. In this retrospect of the vacation we pass 
over all the nasty things at which you laughed 
afterwards. You will notice, however, that the 
incidents and accidents you take such pleasure in 
recounting now, were not so pleasant then. When 
the boat upset, for instance, it was pleasant only 
in retrospect. When the bees chose your head 
for a hive, well, not even retrospect can make that 
pleasant. When you found your clean linen col- 
lars actually melted just when you were going to 
a dance with some one you liked very much, well, 
that too was not mentionable, either then or now. 
"Distance lends enchantment to the view," but all 
in all it was a good time if — (here's that if 
again!) — if you kept tight hold of God's right 
hand all the time you were enjoying yourself. 

Now be brave and look down from the moun- 
tain. There's a year of work to be done. Be 



AFTER YOUR VACATION 185 

glad that you have it. A poor railroad worker 
told me during the hard times that he had made 
only five dollars in four months, and he had de- 
pendent on him a wife and small children and a 
father and mother. If you have work, do it with 
all your might and thank God that you have it. 
Work hard and efficiently and achieve something 
for yourself and for God. Offer the work a3 
you surely offered your vacation to Him, the Giver 
of all good gifts. Surely, work is a gift nowa- 
days and a good one. When you land back from 
Atlantic City, the old office may not appeal to you. 
The factory is drab and dun and all dark colors, 
a dreadful contrast to the mountains and rivers. 
All indoors whether at desks or benches, type- 
writers or sewing machines, classrooms or print- 
ing presses, yes, and all outdoors, whether you are 
at the wheel of a motor-car or on the platforms 
of trolleys, all this is work and it will last, please 
God, till next summer. "A long time," you say. 
But that is the burden of life — work, play, work. 
That is one of the punishments of sin, for we 
must earn our bread by the sweat of our brows. 
We must work. Let us do it well, thoroughly, 
efficiently, with all our might. We ought never 
to be ashamed to play hard if we work hard, but 
only the man who can work hard knows how to 
play hard. 

Thank God for the vacation, first, because you 
had the means to go away for the time and gain 
the strength for the year's work; and second, be- 
cause He gave you the open skies, the broad back 
of the sea, the green shoulders of the mountains, 
the pleasant bosom of the rivers, the cool, placid 
mountain pools, as your vacation places. God is 



1 86 THE HOME WORLD 

surely near us in the wide outdoors. We become 
little in gazing at His work for us, but if we beg 
His help and be cheerful about the future, we 
shall find Him smiling at us in the work we now 
have to do. 



CHAPTER XVIII 
PLAYING OURSELVES INTO HEAVEN 

TO win Heaven is usually spoken of as a diffi- 
cult struggle. We must climb a very erect 
ladder; we must crush our hearts under foot; we 
must become long-faced and solemn. But there 
is a viewpoint that cheers us. We can play our- 
selves into Heaven; we can make the climb up 
the ladder, we can make even the trampling on 
our boisterous affections, play. 

St. Augustine shows us how we can make work 
play. Among his pithy, epigrammatic sayings that 
search the heart of life, is this: "The toys of 
men are called business." If that is true, and if 
what the Apostleship of Prayer means, is also 
true, then we can play ourselves into Heaven. 
First, then, we know that the Apostleship of 
Prayer means a union of members combined to 
pray daily for the intention of Associates and es- 
pecially in union with the Sacred Heart. The 
First Degree consists in saying the Morning Offer- 
ing that is, in offering to God, the thoughts, words, 
and actions of the day. We make the day and all 
we do a prayer and hence we are winning Heaven 
by praying. 

Now the "toys of men are called business." 
This means nothing more than that men play when 
they work, gaining from work all the profit and 

187 



1 88 THE HOME WORLD 

delight and benefit that the child gains from play. 
Therefore, if a man offers all his work in the 
Morning Offering, he is playing himself into 
Heaven. He has already offered his thoughts and 
words and play. The only thing left is work. But 
St. Augustine says that man's business is his toy, 
that is, his play, and so, by making the Morning 
Offering man really plays himself into Heaven. 
We have only to prove that man gains all the 
profit, delight, and interest from his work that 
the child does from his play, and that is not so 
tremendous a task. 

The child with his steam engine and train of 
cars is nothing but a picture in miniature of the 
railroad official and his mighty monsters of steam. 
The boy who winds the spring on his toy mono- 
plane and flips it into the air, watching its flight 
and studying the machine intently, is only a smaller 
shadow of the modern genius. Take the telescope 
and look through the small end. You will see the 
Wright Brothers or Curtiss. Turn the telescope 
around and you will see the boy with his toy. The 
plane means business to the Wrights or Curtiss; 
it is only a toy for the boy, but still the grown 
men know that it is their plaything, too, and the 
boy is ever wishing that he could put the machine 
to some practical use. 

The same is true of the boy with his row of 
tin soldiers, his fleet of battleships, his steel bridge 
or blocks with which to build an architecturally 
perfect house. The girl with her dolls, her sew- 
ing, her tennis racquet, her jacks, and volley ball, 
is an illustration of the same thing, for the doll 
may some day become a real baby, the sewing a 



PLAYING INTO HEAVEN 189 

necessity, and the health, skill and energy acquired 
by games, indispensable. 

Interesting toys will develop into interesting 
work, and behind the toy is the man and the 
woman. 

Furthermore, the first idea in business is not the 
attainment of money. Men may think it is, but 
analysis shows that man sticks to his business be- 
cause he is interested in it, just as the boy sticks 
to his steam engine or aeroplane, not because he 
makes money, but because he is keenly enjoying 
them. He is interested, absorbed, and this is 
the true reason why a man's business may justly 
be called his toy, his plaything. Surely, it is not 
something with which he plays, but in which he 
is interested, and there is no chance of deception 
in calling a man's business his plaything, if you 
take the view that because the business interests 
him, even as the toy interests the child, therefore, 
the business is the man's toy. 

Direct this interest to God in the Morning 
Offering and you will see at once that the man is 
playing himself into Heaven. 

Again, the child benefits by playing and so does 
the man. The benefit does not come so much 
from the mere running of the toy engine. There 
is more than that for the child. He is developing 
his imagination and intellect while playing and 
thus forming himself for the future. When the 
boy starts the engine, ringing the bell, whistling, 
choo-choo-ing, he sees the Broad Street Station 
or the Grand Central. He is reproducing what 
he observed and is simply putting into concrete 
form the pictures on his brain. This is splendid, 



i 9 o THE HOME WORLD 

for it is mind activity, and all children's play gains 
its interest for them not so much because of what 
they play with, but because of the imaginative ele- 
ment underlying their play. 

You cannot help but be benefited by^ your work, 
too. The underlying element is not imagination, 
but the earnest truth that Heaven is your goal, 
that your work is not lasting until it wins interest 
for you in Heaven. Is not this a benefit that you 
can obtain by offering your work to God every 
morning? 

Every boy rejoices in contest just as every man, 
no matter what his business or position, faces con- 
test, opposition, fight. These elements produce 
character, and mental development. The boy's 
steam engine is forever running races with some 
other boy's. His aeroplane may be the only one 
whirling above the dining-room table, but in his 
mind's eye there is another plane challenging his 
all the time. This belongs to Jimmie, next door, 
and there is an interminable contest and a con- 
tinual defeat — for Jimmie. This element in play 
helps to make the boy heroic, since he faces diffi- 
culty, delights in contest, and is most chivralous to 
his fallen rival. 

The same is true of the man engaged in busi- 
ness. The contest is unending. He, indeed, does 
not have to imagine rivals. He would prefer that 
they were products of his brain, but he must come 
face to face with realities only too evident, and 
yet the benefit for him is the same as for the boy. 
His character is developed. His manhood is 
matured by facing and overcoming the problems. 
So then the interest in the work itself, the gain in 
delight, in character development and in material 



PLAYING INTO HEAVEN 191 

prosperity, bind man to his work, call it a toy, if 
you will. 

This is something worth while offering to the 
Sacred Heart each day, for this means struggle, 
this is the struggle of your day. Offer it with the 
rest and the world becomes nothing more than a 
Noah's Ark of delightful toys, wherewith we win 
Heaven. 

Reflect on this truth, that when a man retires 
from his business, he begins to fail in health. Is 
it not often true that old age begins to lean heavily 
on a man's shoulders only when he leaves his man- 
hood toys of work behind him? Life without 
work is for the grown man what life without toys 
is for the boy. We live for accomplishment not 
only for this life but for Heaven, and when we 
fail to accomplish; when we resign, or retire, we 
cease to interest ourselves and the rest of the 
world. But it is more serious than that. What is 
the great reason for modern social evils if not 
the fact that men and women have too much lei- 
sure? You know that the child without his toys 
will surely get into mischief, and the man and 
woman without work will get into the courts and 
the noisome newspapers. 

You can never play yourself into Heaven if 
you resign or retire from the Morning Offering. 
No matter what the delight or the profit or the 
character development gained in your work, you 
must offer it all to God if you will gain Heaven 
through play. Offer everything to the Sacred 
Heart of Jesus, and even as the boy grows out of 
his toys, so will you grow out of the business-toys 
into the maturity of God's sonship, since when you 
worked you did it for Him, and now there is 



192 THE HOME WORLD 

naught to do but rejoice in the Heaven your work 
has won. 

Thus the toys of the boy help train him for man- 
hood, and the toys of the man, his work, develop 
him into a child of God, if it is all offered to Him. 

God be with you in your little home-worlds, 
and may He send you the blessing which the old 
Patriarch gave his son: "God give thee the dew 
of heaven and of the fatness of the earth," that 
is, the grace of material prosperity and the grace 
of God. 1 

y Gen. xsvii, 28. 

THE END. 



Printed by Benziger Brothers, New York. 



-'££*, J 






'/O 



v. 



pK>. 



uM* *^ 






Deacidified using the Bookkeeper proces 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Feb. 2006 

PreservationTechnologie: 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATIO 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township. PA 16066 
(724) 779-21 1 1 



II 



LIBRARY OF 




CONGRESS 



°017 352 558 8 



I 



